[OMASCARLYLE 

MACPHERSON 




FAMOUS 
•SCOTS' 
•SERIES* 




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THOMAS 
CARLYLE 

BY 
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MACPHERSON <g=^ 

AS 

FAMOUS 
•SCOTS 
•SERIES 




PUBLISHED B 
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SCRIBNER'S SONS 
SS^fT NEW YORK 







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PREFACE 

Of the writing of books on Carlyle there is no end. 
Why, then, it may pertinently be asked, add another 
stone to the Carlylean cairn ? The reply is obvious. 
In a series dealing with famous Scotsmen, Carlyle has 
a rightful claim to a niche in the temple of Fame. 
While prominence has been given in the book to the 
Scottish side of Carlyle's life, the fact has not been 
lost sight of that Carlyle owed much to Germany; 
indeed, if we could imagine the spirit of a German 
philosopher inhabiting the body of a Covenanter of 
dyspeptic and sceptical tendencies, a good idea would 
be had of Thomas Carlyle. Needless to say, I 
have been largely indebted to the biography by Mr 
Froude, and to Carlyle's Reminiscences. Into the con- 
troversy over Mr Froude's editorial conduct I have 
not entered. In the body of this work will be found 
a hitherto unpublished letter received by me some 
years ago, in which Mr Froude gives a vigorous pre- 
sentment of his side of the controversy. After all has 
been said, the fact remains that Froude's portrait, 



6 PREFACE 

though truthful in the main, is somewhat deficient 
in light and shade — qualities whidi the student 
will find admirably supplied in Professor Masson's 
charming little book, "Carlyle Personally, and in 
his Writings." To the Professor I am under deep 
obligation for the interest he has shown in the 
book. In the course of his perusal of the proofs, 
Professor Masson made valuable corrections and sug- 
gestions, which deserve more than a formal acknow- 
ledgment. To Mr Haldane, M.P., my thanks are 
also due for his suggestive criticism of the chapter on 
German thought, upon which he is an acknowledged 
authority. 

I have also to express my deep obligations to Mr 
John Morley, who, in the midst of pressing engage- 
ments, kindly found time to read the proof sheets. 
In a private note Mr Morley has been good enough 
to express his general sympathy and concurrence with 
my estimate of Carlyle. 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER I 
Early Life 



I'AGE 

9 



CHAPTER II 
Craigenputtock — Literary Efforts . , 29 

CHAPTER III 
Carlyle's Mental Development ... 42 

CHAPTER IV 
Life in London ..... 65 

CHAPTER V 
Holiday Journeyings— Literary Work . . 79 

CHAPTER VI 
Rectorial Address — Death of Mrs Carlyle . 112 

CHAPTER VII 
Last Years and Death of Carlyle . . 129 



8 CONTENTS 

CHAPTER VIII 

PAGE 

Carlyle as a Social and Political Thinker . 138 

CHAPTER IX 
Carlyle as an Inspirational Force . . 152 



THOMAS CARLYLE 

CHAPTER I 

EARLY LIFE 

1 A great man,' says Hegel, ' condemns the world to 
the task of explaining him.' Emphatically does the 
remark apply to Thomas Carlyle. When he began to 
leave his impress in literature, he was treated as a con- 
fusing and inexplicable element. Opinion oscillated 
between the view of James Mill, that Carlyle was an 
insane rhapsodist, and that of Jeffrey, that he was 
afflicted with a chronic craze for singularity. Jeffrey's 
verdict sums up pretty effectively the attitude of the 
critics of the time to the new writer : — ' I suppose 
that you will treat me as something worse than an ass, 
when I say that I am firmly persuaded the great source 
of your extravagance, and all that makes your writings 
intolerable to many and ridiculous to not a few, is not 
so much any real peculiarity of opinion, as an unlucky 
ambition to appear more original than you are.' The 
blunder made by Jeffrey in regard both to Carlyle and 



io FAMOUS SCOTS 

Wordsworth emphasises the truth which critics seem 
reluctant to bear in mind, that, before the great man 
can be explained, he must be appreciated. Emphati- 
cally true of Carlyle it is that he creates the standard 
by which he is judged. Carlyle resembles those 
products of the natural world which biologists call 
1 sports ' — products which, springing up in a spon- 
taneous and apparently erratic way, for a time defy 
classification. The time is appropriate for an attempt 
to classify the great thinker, whose birth took place one 
hundred years ago. 

Towards the close of the last century a stone-mason, 
named James Carlyle, started business on his own 
account in the village of Ecclefechan, Dumfriesshire. 
He was an excellent tradesman, and frugal withal ; and 
in the year 1791 he married a distant kinswoman of 
his own, Janet Carlyle, who died after giving birth 
to a son. In the beginning of 1795 he married one 
Margaret Aitken, a worthy, intelligent woman ; and on 
the 4th of December following a son was born, whom 
they called Thomas, after his paternal grandfather. 
This child was destined to be the most original writer 
of his time. 

Little Thomas was early taught to read by his 
mother, and at the age of five he learnt to ' count ' 
from his father. He was then sent to the village school ; 
and in his seventh year he was reported to be ' com- 
plete ' in English. As the schoolmaster was weak in 



THOMAS CARLYLE n 

the classics, Tom was taught the rudiments of Latin by 
the burgher minister, of which strict sect James Carlyle 
was a zealous member. One summer morning, in 1806, 
his father took him to Annan Academy. • It was a 
bright morning,' he wrote long years thereafter, ' and 
to me full of movement, of fluttering boundless hopes, 
saddened by parting with mother, with home, and 
which afterwards were cruelly disappointed.' At that 
' doleful and hateful Academy,' to use his own words, 
Thomas Carlyle spent three years, learning to read 
French and Latin, and the Greek alphabet, as well as 
acquiring a smattering of geometry and algebra. 

It was in the Academy that he got his first glimpse 
of Edward Irving — probably in April or May 1808 — 
who had called to pay his respects to his old teacher, 
Mr Hope. Thomas's impression of him was that of 
a ' flourishing slip of a youth, with coal-black hair, 
swarthy clear complexion, very straight on his feet, 
and except for the glaring squint alone, decidedly 
handsome.' Years passed before young Carlyle saw 
Irving's face again. 

James Carlyle, although an austere man, and the 
reverse of demonstrative, was bound up in his son, 
sparing no expense upon the youth's education. On 
one occasion he exclaimed, with an unwonted outburst 
of glee, ' Tom, I do not grudge thy schooling now, 
when thy uncle Frank owns thee to be a better arith- 
metician than himself.' Early recognising the natural 



iz FAMOUS SCOTS 

talent and aptitude of his son, he determined to send him 
to the nearest university, with a view to Thomas studying 
for the ministry. One crisp winter's morning, in 1809, 
found Thomas Carlyle on his way to Edinburgh, trudg- 
ing the entire distance — one hundred miles or so. 

He went through the usual university course, 
attended the divinity classes, and delivered the cus- 
tomary discourses in English and Latin. But Tom was 
not destined to ' wag his head in a pulpit,' for he had 
conscientious objections which parental control in no 
way interfered with. Referring to this vital period of 
his life, Carlyle wrote : ' His [father's] tolerance for 
me, his trust in me, was great. When I declined 
going forward into the Church (though his heart was 
set upon it), he respected my scruples, my volition, 
and patiently let me have my way.' Carlyle never 
looked back to his university life with satisfaction. 
In his interesting recollections Mr Moncure Conway 
represents Carlyle, describing his experiences as follows : 
— ' Very little help did I get from anybody in those 
years, and, as I may say, no sympathy at all in all this 
old town. And if there was any difference, it was found 
least where I might most have hoped for it. There 

was Professor . For years I attended his lectures, 

in all weathers and all hours. Many and many a time, 
when the class was called together, it was found to 
consist of one individual — to wit, of him now speak- 
ing ; and still oftener, when others were present, the 



THOMAS CARLYLE 13 

only person who had at all looked into the lesson 
assigned was the same humble individual. I remember 
no instance in which these facts elicited any note or 
comment from that instructor. He once requested 
me to translate a mathematical paper, and I worked 
through it the whole of one Sunday, and it was laid 
before him, and it was received without remark or 
thanks. After such long years, I came to part with 
him, and to get my certificate. Without a word, he 
wrote on a bit of paper : " I certify that Mr Thomas 
Carlyle has been in my class during his college course, 
and has made good progress in his studies." Then he 
rang a bell, and ordered a servant to open the front 
door for me. Not the slightest sign that I was a 
person whom he could have distinguished in any 

crowd. And so I parted from old .' 

Professor Masson, who in loving, painstaking style 
has ferreted all the facts about Carlyle's university life, 
sums up in these words : ' Without assuming that he 
meant the university described in Sartor Resartus to 
stand literally for Edinburgh University, of his own 
experience, we have seen enough to show that any 
specific training of much value he considered himself 
to owe to his four years in the Arts classes in Edin- 
burgh University, was the culture of his mathematical 
faculty under Leslie, and that for the rest he acknow- 
ledged merely a certain benefit from being in so many 
class-rooms where matters intellectual were professedly 



14 FAMOUS SCOTS 

in the atmosphere, and where he learned to take advan- 
tage of books.' As Carlyle put it in his Rectorial 
Address of 1866, 'What I have found the university 
did for me is that it taught me to read in various 
languages, in various sciences, so that I go into the 
books which treated of these things, and gradually 
penetrate into any department I wanted to make 
myself master of, as I found it suit me.' 

In 1814, Carlyle obtained the mathematical tutor- 
ship at Annan. Out of his slender salary of ^60 or 
£70 he was able to save something, so that he was 
practically independent. By and by James Carlyle gave 
up his trade, and settled on a small farm at Mainhill, 
about two miles from Ecclefechan. Thither Thomas 
hied with unfeigned delight at holiday time, for he 
led the life of a recluse at Annan, his books being his 
sole companions. 

Edward Irving, to whom Carlyle was introduced in 
college days, was now settled as a dominie in Kirk- 
caldy. His teaching was not favourably viewed by 
some of the parents, who started a rival school, and 
resolved to import a second master, with the result 
that Carlyle was selected. Irving, with great mag- 
nanimity, gave him a cordial welcome to the ' Lang 
Toon,' and the two Annandale natives became fast 
friends. The elder placed his well-selected library at 
the disposal of the younger, and together they explored 
the whole countryside. Short visits to Edinburgh had 



THOMAS CARLYLE 15 

a special attraction for both, where they met with a 
few kindred spirits. On one of those visits, Carlyle, 
who had not cut off his connection with the university, 
called at the Divinity Hall to put down his name 
formally on the annual register. In his own words : 
' Old Dr Ritchie " not at home " when I called to enter 
myself. " Good ! " answered I ; " let the omen be ful- 
filled." ' Carlyle's studies in Kirkcaldy made him eager 
to contribute to the fulfilment of the omen. Among the 
authors which he read out of the Edinburgh University 
library was Gibbon, who pushed Carlyle's sceptical 
questionings to a definite point. In a conversation 
with Professor Masson, Carlyle stated that to his 
reading of Gibbon he dated the extirpation from his 
mind of the last remnant that had been left in it of the 
orthodox belief in miracles. 

In the space of two years, Carlyle and Irving ' got 
tired of schoolmastering and its mean contradictions 
and poor results.' They bade Kirkcaldy farewell and 
made for Edinburgh, — Irving to lodge in Bristo Street, 
' more expensive rooms than mine,' naively remarks 
Carlyle, where he gave breakfasts to ' intellectualities 
he fell in with, I often a guest with them. They were 
but stupid intellectualities, etc' As for their prospects, 
this is what Carlyle says : ' Irving's outlooks in Edin- 
burgh were not of the best, considerably checkered 
with dubiety, opposition, and even flat disfavour in 
some quarters ; but at least they were far superior to 



1 6 FAMOUS SCOTS 

mine, and indeed, I was beginning my four or five 
most miserable, dark, sick, and heavy-laden years ; 
Irving, after some staggerings aback, his seven or eight 
healthiest and brightest. He had as one item several 
good hundreds of money to wait upon. My peculium 
I don't recollect, but it could not have exceeded ^ioo. 
I was without friends, experience, or connection in the 
sphere of human business, was of shy humour, proud 
enough and to spare, and had begun my long curri- 
culum of dyspepsia which has never ended since ! ' * 
Carlyle's intention was to study for the Bar, if per- 
chance he could eke out a livelihood by private teach- 
ing. He obtained one or two pupils, wrote a stray- 
article or so for the ' Encyclopaedias ' ; but as he barely 
managed to pay his way, he speedily gave up his law 
studies. He was at this time — the winter of 1819 — 
' advancing,' as he phrases it, ' towards huge instal- 
ments of bodily and spiritual wretchedness in this 
my Edinburgh purgatory.' It was about a couple of 
years thereafter ere Carlyle went through what he has 
described as his ' spiritual new birth.' 

When Carlyle was in diligent search for congenial 
employment, a certain Captain Basil Hall crossed his 
path, to whom Edward Irving had given lessons in 
mathematics. The 'small lion,' as he calls the cap- 
tain, came to Carlyle, and wished the latter to go out 
with him ' to Dunglas,' and there do ' lunars ' in his 

* Reminiscences, vol. i. p. 141. 



THOMAS CARLYLE 17 

name, he looking on and learning of Carlyle ' what 
would come of its own sweet will.' The said ' lunars ' 
meanwhile were to go to the Admiralty, ' testifying 
there what a careful studious Captain he was, and help 
to get him promotion, so the little wretch smilingly 
told me.' Carlyle adds : ' I remember the figure of 
him in my dim lodging as a gay, crackling, sniggering 
spectre, one dusk, and endeavouring to seduce my 
affability in lieu of liberal wages into this adventure. 
Wages, I think, were to be smallish (" so poor are we "), 
but then the great Playfair is coming on visit. " You 
will see Professor Playfair." I had not the least notion 
of such an enterprise on these shining terms, and 
Captain Basil with his great Playfair in posse vanished 
for me into the shades of dusk for good.'* When 
private teaching would not come Carlyle's way, he 
timorously aimed towards ' literature.' He had taken 
to the study of German, and conscious of his own 
powers in that direction, he applied in vain to more 
than one London bookseller, proposing a complete 
transition of Schiller. Irving not only did his utmost 
to comfort Carlyle in his spiritual wrestlings, but he 
tried to find him employment. The two friends con- 
tinued to make pleasant excursions, and in June 182 1 
Irving brought Carlyle to Haddington, an event which 
was destined to colour all his subsequent life ; for it 
was then and there he first saw Jane Welsh, a sight, he 
acknowledged, for ever memorable to him. 
* Reminiscences, vol. i. p. 142. 



1 8 FAMOUS SCOTS 

1 In the ancient county town of Haddington, July 14, 
1 801, there was born,' wrote Thomas Carlyle in 1869, 
' to a lately wedded pair, not natives of the place but 
already reckoned among the best class of people there, 
a little daughter whom they named Jane Baillie Welsh, 
and whose subsequent and final name (her own 
common signature for many years) was fane Welsh 
Carfy/e, and now so stands, now that she is mine in 
death only, on her and her father's tombstone in the 
Abbey Kirk of that town. July 14, 1801 ; I was 
then in my sixth year, far away in every sense, now 
near and infinitely concerned, trying doubtfully after 
some three years' sad cunctation, if there is anything 
that I can profitably put on record of her altogether 
bright, beneficent and modest little life, and her, as my 
final task in this world.' * The picture was never com- 
pleted by the master-hand ; the ' effort was too dis- 
tressing ' ; so all his notes and letters were handed over 
to a literary executor. 

At the time of Carlyle's introduction to Miss Welsh, 
she was living with her widowed mother. Her father, 
Dr John Welsh, came of a good family, and was a 
popular country physician. Her mother was Grace 
Welsh of Capelgill, and was reckoned a beautiful, but 
haughty woman. Their marriage took place in 1800, 
and their only child, Jane, was born, as we have seen, 
the year following. Her most intimate friend, Miss 

* Reminiscences, vol. ii. p. 69. 



THOMAS CARLYLE 19 

Geraldine Jewsbury, tells us that Miss Welsh had 'a 
graceful and beautifully-formed figure, upright and 
supple, a delicate complexion of creamy white, with a 
pale rose tint in the cheeks, lovely eyes full of fire and 
softness, and with great depths of meaning.' She had 
a musical voice, was a good talker, extremely witty, and 
so fascinating in every way that a relative of hers told 
Miss Jewsbury that every man who spoke to her for 
five minutes felt impelled to make her an offer of 
marriage. Be that as it may, it is certain that Miss 
Jane Welsh had troops of suitors in and around the 
quiet country town. She always spoke of her mother 
with deep affection and great admiration. Her father 
she reverenced, and he was the only person during her 
girlhood who had any real influence over her. This, 
then, was the young lady of whom Thomas Carlyle 
carried back to Edinburgh a sweet and lasting impres- 
sion. They corresponded at intervals, and Thomas 
was permitted to send her books occasionally. 

Edward Irving used to live in Dr Welsh's house 
when he taught in the local school, and he led Jeannie 
— a winsome, wilful lass — to take an interest in the 
classics. She entertained a girlish passion for the 
handsome youth, and there can be little doubt that 
they would have ultimately been married, were it not 
that the eldest daughter of a Kirkcaldy parson, Miss 
Martin, had managed to charm Irving for the time 
being,' and an engagement followed. 



20 FAMOUS SCOTS 

Before Carlyle had drifted into Edinburgh he had, 
of course, heard of the fame of Francis Jeffrey. He 
heard him once speaking in the General Assembly ' on 
some poor cause.' Jeffrey's pleading seemed to Carlyle 
'abundantly clear, full of liveliness, free flowing in- 
genuity.' • My admiration,' he adds, ' went frankly 
with that of others, but I think it was hardly of very 
deep character.' When Carlyle was in the ' slough of 
despond,' he bethought him of Jeffrey, this time as 
editor of the Edinburgh Review. He resolved to 
try the ' great man ' with an actual contribution. The 
subject was a condemnation of a new French book, in 
which a mechanical theory of gravitation was elabor- 
ately worked out by the author. He got ' a certain 
feeble but enquiring quasi-disciple ' of his own to act 
as amanuensis, from whom he kept his ulterior purpose 
quite secret. Looking back through the dim vista of 
seven-and-forty years, this is what Carlyle says of that 
anxious time : ' Well do I remember those dreary even- 
ings in Bristo Street ; oh, what ghastly passages and 
dismal successive spasms of attempt at " literary enter- 
prise " ! . . . My " Review of Pictet " all fairly written 
out in George Dalgleish's good clerk hand, I penned 
some brief polite note to the great editor, and walked 
off with the small parcel one night to his address in 
George Street. I very well remember leaving it with 
his valet there, and disappearing in the night with 
various thoughts and doubts ! My hopes had never 



THOMAS CARLYLE 21 

risen high, or in fact risen at all ; but for a fortnight 
or so they did not quite die out, and then it was in 
absolute zero ; no answer, no return of MS., absolutely 
no notice taken, which was a form of catastrophe more 
complete than even I had anticipated ! There rose in 
my head a pungent little note which might be written 
to the great man, with neatly cutting considerations 
offered him from the small unknown ditto ; but I wisely 
judged it was still more dignified to let the matter lie 
as it was, and take what I had got for my own benefit 
only. Nor did I ever mention it to almost anybody, 
least of all to Jeffrey in subsequent changed times, 
when at anyrate it was fallen extinct.' * 

Carlyle's star was, however, in the ascendant, for in 
1822 he became tutor to the two sons of a wealthy 
lady, Mrs Charles Buller, at a salary of ^200 a year. 
It was through Irving that this appointment came. 
The young lads boarded with ' a good old Dr Fleming ' 
in George Square, whither Carlyle went daily from his 
lodgings at 3 Moray Street, Pilrig Street. The Bullers 
finally returned to London, Carlyle staying at his 
father's little homestead of Mainhill to finish a transla- 
tion of ' Wilhelm Meister.' He followed the Bullers 
to London, where he resigned the tutorship in the 
hope of getting some literary work. 

Irving introduced him to the proprietor of the 
London Magazine, who offered Carlyle sixteen 
* Reminiscences, vol. ii. pp. 18, 19. 



22 FAMOUS SCOTS 

guineas a sheet for a series of ' Portraits of Men of 
Genius and Character.' The first was to be a life of 
Schiller, which appeared in that periodical in 1823-4. 
Mr Boyd, the Edinburgh publisher, accepted the trans- 
lation of ( Wilhelm Meister.' ' Two years before,' 
wrote Carlyle in his Reminiscences, 1 1 had at length, 
after some repulsions, got into the heart of " Wilhelm 
Meister," and eagerly read it through ; my sally out, 
after finishing, along the vacant streets of Edinburgh, 
a windless, Scotch-misty Saturday night, is still vivid to 
me. " Grand, surely, harmoniously built together, far- 
seeing, wise, and true. When, for many years, or 
almost in my whole life before, have I read such a 
book ? " ' A short letter from Goethe in Weimar, in 
acknowledgment of a copy of his ' Wilhelm Meister,' 
was peculiarly gratifying to Carlyle. 

Carlyle was not happy in London ; dyspepsia and 
* the noises ' sorely troubled him. He was anxious to 
be gone. To the surprise of Irving — who was now 
settled in the metropolis — and everybody else, he re- 
solutely decided to return to Annandale, where his 
father had leased for him a compact little farm at 
Hoddam Hill, three miles from Mainhill, and visible 
from the fields at the back of it. ' Perhaps it was the 
very day before my departure,' wrote Carlyle, ' at least 
it is the last I recollect of him [Irving], we were walk- 
ing in the streets multifariously discoursing ; a dim 
grey day, but dry and airy. At the corner of Cockspur 



THOMAS CARLYLE 23 

Street we paused for a moment, meeting Sir John Sin- 
clair ("Statistical Account of Scotland" etc.), whom I 
had never seen before and never saw again. A lean 
old man, tall but stooping, in tartan cloak, face very 
wrinkly, nose blue, physiognomy vague and with dis- 
tinction as one might have expected it to be. He 
spoke to Irving with benignant respect, whether to me 
at all I don't recollect.' 

Carlyle shook the dust of London from off his feet, 
and by easy stages made his way northwards. Arrived 
at Ecclefechan, within two miles of his father's house, 
while the coach was changing horses, Carlyle noticed 
through the window his little sister Jean earnestly look- 
ing up for him. She, with Jenny, the youngest of the 
family, was at school in the village, and had come 
out daily to inspect the coach in hope of seeing him. 
' Her bonny little blush and radiancy of look when I 
let down the window and suddenly disclosed myself,' 
wrote Carlyle in 1867, 'are still present to me.' On 
the 26th of May 1825, he established himself at 
Hoddam Hill, and set about ' German Romance.' His 
brother Alick managed the farm, and his mother, with 
one of the girls, was generally there to look after his 
comforts. 

During the intervening years, Carlyle's intimacy with 
Miss Jane Welsh gradually increased, with occasional 
differences. She had promised to marry him if he 
could ' achieve independence.' Carlyle's idea was that 



24 FAMOUS SCOTS 

after their marriage they should settle upon the farm 
of Craigenputtock, which had been in the possession 
of the Welsh family for generations, and devote himself 
to literary work. By and by Miss Welsh accepted his 
offer of marriage, but not until she had acquainted him 
of the Irving incident. The wedding took place on 
the 17th of October 1825, and the young couple took 
up housekeeping in a quiet cottage at Comely Bank, 
Edinburgh. Of his life at this period, the best descrip- 
tion is given by Carlyle himself, in a letter to Mrs 
Basil Montague, dated Christmas Day 1826 : — 

' In spite of ill-health I reckon myself moderately 
happy here, much happier than men usually are, or than 
such a fool as I deserve to be. My good wife exceeds 
all my hopes, and is, in truth, I believe, among the best 
women that the world contains. The philosophy of 
the heart is far better than that of the understanding. 
She loves me with her whole soul, and this one senti- 
ment has taught her much that I have long been vainly 
at the schools to learn. . . . On the whole, what I 
chiefly want is occupation ; which, when the times 
grow better, or my own genius gets more alert and 
thorough-going, will not fail, I suppose, to present 
itself. . . . Some day — oh, that the day were here ! — I 
shall surely speak out those things that are lying in me, 
and give me no sleep till they are spoken ! Or else, if 
the Fates would be so kind as to shew me — that I had 
nothing to say ! This, perhaps, is the real secret of it 



THOMAS CARLYLE 25 

after all ; a hard result, yet not intolerable, were it once 
clear and certain. Literature, it seems, is to be my 
trade, but the present aspects of it among us seem to 
me peculiarly perplexed and uninviting.' * Here, as in 
undertone, we discover what Professor Masson calls the 
constitutional sadness of Carlyle — a sadness which, 
along with indifferent health, led him to be impatient 
at trifles, morbid, proud, and at times needlessly aggres- 
sive in speech and demeanour. These traits, however, 
in the early years of married life were not specially 
visible; and on the whole the Comely Bank period 
may be described as one of calm happiness. Carlyle's 
forecast was correct. Literature was to be his trade. 

In the following spring came a letter to Carlyle from 
Procter (Barry Cornwall), whom he had met in London, 
offering to introduce him formally to Jeffrey, whom he 
certified to be a ' very fine fellow.' One evening 
Carlyle sallied forth from Comely Bank for Jeffrey's 
house in George Street, armed with Procter's letter. 
He was shown into the study. ' Five pair of candles,' 
he relates, ' were cheerfully burning, in the light of 
which sate my famous little gentleman ; laid aside his 
work, cheerfully invited me to sit, and began talking in 
a perfectly human manner.' The interview lasted for 
about twenty minutes, during which time Jeffrey had 
made kind enquiries what his visitor was doing and 
what he had published ; adding, ' We must give you a 

* Masson's ' Edinburgh Sketches and Memories,' pp. 329-30. 



26 FAMOUS SCOTS 

lift,' an offer, Carlyle says, which in ' some complimen- 
tary way ' he managed to Jeffrey's satisfaction to decline. 
Jeffrey returned Carlyle's call, when he was captivated 
by Mrs Carlyle. The intimacy rapidly increased, and 
a short paper by Carlyle on Jean Paul appeared in the 
very next issue of the Edinburgh Review. ' It 
made,' says the author, 'what they call a sensation 
among the Edinburgh buckrams ; which was greatly 
heightened next number by the more elaborate and 
grave article on " German Literature " generally, which 
set many tongues wagging, and some few brains con- 
sidering, what this strange monster could be that was 
come to disturb their quiescence and the established 
order of Nature ! Some newspapers or newspaper took 
to denouncing " the Mystic School," which my bright 
little woman declared to consist of me alone, or of her 
and me, and for a long while after merrily used to 
designate me by that title.' 

Mrs Carlyle proved an admirable hostess ; Jeffrey 
became a frequent visitor at Comely Bank, and they 
discovered ' mutual old cousinships ' by the maternal 
side. Jeffrey's friendship was an immense acquisition 
to Carlyle, and everybody regarded it as his highest 
good fortune. The literati of Edinburgh came to see 
her, and ' listen to her husband's astonishing mono- 
logues.' To Carlyle's regret, Jeffrey would not talk in 
their frequent rambles of his experiences in the world, 
1 nor of things concrete and current,' but was ' theoretic 



THOMAS CARLYLE 27 

generally ' j and seemed bent on converting Carlyle 
from his ' German mysticism,' back merely, as the 
latter could perceive, into ' dead Edinburgh Whiggism, 
scepticism, and materialism ' ; ' which I felt,' says 
Carlyle, 'to be a for ever impossible enterprise.' They 
had long discussions, ' parryings, and thrustings,' which 
1 1 have known continue night after night,' relates 
Carlyle, ' till two or three in the morning (when I was 
his guest at Craigcrook, as once or twice happened in 
coming years) : there we went on in brisk logical 
enterprise with all the rest of the house asleep, and 
parted usually in good humour, though after a game 
which was hardly worth the candle. I found him 
infinitely witty, ingenious, sharp of fence, but not in 
any sense deep ; and used without difficulty to hold 
my own with him.' Jeffrey did everything in his power 
to further Carlyle's prospects and projects. He tried 
to obtain for him the professorship of Moral Philosophy 
at St Andrews University, vacated by Dr Chalmers. 
Testimonials were given by Irving, Brewster, Buller, 
Wilson, Jeffrey, and Goethe. They failed, however, in 
consequence of the opposition of the Principal, Dr 
Nicol. 

To Carlyle, doubtless, the most memorable incidents 
of the Edinburgh period was his correspondence with 
Goethe. The magnetic spell thrown over Carlyle by 
Goethe will ever remain a mystery. Between the two 
men there was no intellectual affinity. One would 



28 FAMOUS SCOTS 

have expected Goethe the Pagan to have repelled 
Carlyle the Puritan, unless we have recourse to the 
philosophy of opposites, and conclude that the tumul- 
tuous soul of Carlyle found congenial repose in the 
Greek-like restfulness of Goethe. The great German 
had been deeply impressed by the profound grasp 
which Carlyle was displaying of German literature. 
After reading a letter which he had received from 
Walter Scott, Goethe remarked to Eckermann : " I 
almost wonder that Walter Scott does not say a word 
about Carlyle, who has so decided a German tendency 
that he must certainly be known to him. It is admir- 
able in Carlyle, that, in his judgment of our German 
authors, he has especially in view the me?ital and moral 
core as that which is really influential. Carlyle is a 
moral force of great importance ; there is in him much 
for the future and we cannot foresee what he will 
produce and effect.' 



CHAPTER II 

CRAIGENPUTTOCK LITERARY EFFORTS 

Carlyle was feeling the force of Scott's remark that 
literature was a bad crutch — his prospects being far 
from bright. The Carlyles had been a little over 
eighteen months at Comely Bank, when their exten- 
sive circle of friends were surprised to hear of their 
intended withdrawal to Craigenputtock. Efforts were 
made to dissuade Carlyle from pursuing what at the 
time appeared a suicidal course. He was the intimate 
associate of the brilliant Jeffrey; he was within the 
charmed circle of Edinburgh Reviewers ; he had laid 
the foundation of a literary reputation. Outwardly all 
seemed well with Carlyle j but ' the step,' himself says, 
* had been well meditated, saw itself to be founded on 
irrefragable considerations of health, finance, &c, &c, 
unknown to bystanders, and could not be forborne or 
altered.' Next to his marriage with Miss Welsh, 
Carlyle's retirement to the howling wilds of Craigen- 
puttock at that juncture was the most momentous step 
in his long life. He was conscious of his own powers, 
and he clearly discerned how those powers could best 

29 



3 o FAMOUS SCOTS 

be utilised and developed. Hence his determin- 
ation to bid adieu to Edinburgh. And in that 
resolve he was fortified by the loyal support of his 
wife. 

Jeffrey promised to visit the Carlyles at Craigen- 
puttock as soon as they got settled. Meanwhile, they 
stayed a week at his own house in Moray Place, after 
their furniture was on the road, and they were waiting 
till it should arrive and ' render a new home possible 
amid the moors and the mountains.' 'Of our his- 
tory at Craigenputtock,' says Carlyle, ' there might a 
great deal be written which might amuse the curious ; 
for it was in fact a very singular scene and arena for 
such a pair as my darling and me, with such a life 
ahead. ... It is a history which I by no means intend 
to write, with such or with any object. To me there 
is a sacredness of interest in it consistent only with 
silence. It was the field of endless nobleness and 
beautiful talent and virtue in her who is now gone; 
also of good industry, and many loving and blessed 
thoughts in myself, while living there by her side. 
Poverty and mean obstruction had given origin to it, 
and continued to preside over it, but were transformed 
by human valour of various sorts into a kind of victory 
and royalty. Something of high and great dwelt in it, 
though nothing could be smaller and lower than many 
of the details.' * 

* Reminiscences, vol. ii. p. 30. 



THOMAS CARLYLE 31 

The Jeffreys were not slow in appearing at Craigen- 
puttock. Their ' big carriage,' narrates the humorous 
host, ' climbed our rugged hill-roads, landed the three 
guests — Charlotte (" Sharlie "), with pa and ma — and 
the clever old valet maid that waited on them ; . . . 
but I remember nothing so well as the consummate 
art with which my dear one played the domestic field- 
marshal, and spread out our exiguous resources, with- 
out fuss or bustle ; to cover everything, a coat of 
hospitality and even elegance and abundance. I have 
been in houses ten times, nay, a hundred times, as rich, 
where things went not so well. Though never bred to 
this, but brought up in opulent plenty by a mother that 
could bear no partnership in housekeeping, she, find- 
ing it become necessary, loyally applied herself to it, 
and soon surpassed in it all the women I have ever 
seen.' * Of Mrs Carlyle's frankness her husband gives 
this amusing glimpse : ' One day at dinner, I remember, 
Jeffrey admired the fritters or bits of pancake he was 
eating, and she let him know, not without some vestige 
of shock to him, that she had made them. " What, 
you ! twist up the frying-pan, and catch them in the 
air ? " Even so, my high friend, and you may turn 
it over in your mind ! ' When the Jeffreys were leav- 
ing, ' I remarked,' says Carlyle, that they ' carried off 
our little temporary paradise ; ... to which bit of 
pathos Jeffrey answered by a friendly little sniff of 
* Reminiscences, vol. ii. p. 31. 



32 FAMOUS SCOTS 

quasi-mockery or laughter through the nose, and rolled 
prosperously away.' 

The Carlyles in course of time visited the Jeffreys 
at Craigcrook, the last occasion being for about a fort- 
night. Carlyle says it was 'a shining sort of affair, 
but did not in effect accomplish much for any of 
us. Perhaps, for one thing, we stayed too long, 
Jeffrey was beginning to be seriously incommoded in 
health, had bad sleep, cared not how late he sat, and 
we had now more than ever a series of sharp fencing 
bouts, night after night, which could decide nothing 
for either of us, except our radical incompatibility in 
respect of world theory, and the incurable divergence 
of our opinions on the most important matters. "You 
are so dreadfully in earnest ! " said he to me once or 
oftener. Besides, I own now I was deficient in rever- 
ence to him, and had not then, nor, alas ! have ever 
acquired, in my solitary and mostly silent existence, the 
art of gently saying strong things, or of insinuating my 
dissent, instead of uttering it right out at the risk of 
offence or otherwise.' Then he adds : ' These " stormy 
sittings," as Mrs Jeffrey laughingly called them, did not 
improve our relation to one another. But these were 
the last we had of that nature. In other respects 
Edinburgh had been barren ; effulgences of " Edin- 
burgh society," big dinners, parties, we in due measure 
had ; but nothing there was very interesting either to 
her or to me, and all of it passed away as an obliging 



THOMAS CARLYLE 33 

pageant merely. Well do I remember our return to 
Craigenputtock, after nightfall, amid the clammy yellow 
leaves and desolate ruins, with the clink of Alick's 
stithy alone audible of human.' * 

It was during his first two years' residence at Craigen- 
puttock that Carlyle wrote his famous essay on Burns ; 
but his principal work was upon German literature, 
especially upon Goethe. His magazine writings being 
his only means of support, and as he devoted much 
time to them, it is not surprising that financial matters 
worried him. About this time Jeffrey, to whom doubt- 
less he confided his trouble, generously offered to 
confer upon him an annuity of ^100, which Carlyle 
declined to accept. Jeffrey repeated the offer on two 
subsequent occasions, with a like result. Carlyle in 
his Reminiscences says that he could not doubt but 
Jeffrey had intended an act of real generosity ; and yet 
Carlyle penned the ungracious remark, that 'perhaps 
there was something in the manner of it that savoured 
of consciousness and of screwing one's self up to the 
point ; less of god-like pity for a fine fellow and his 
struggles, than of human determination to do a fine 
action of one's own, which might add to the prompti- 
tude of my refusal.' It is not surprising, therefore, to 
find Carlyle suspecting that Jeffrey's feelings were cool- 
ing towards him. Jeffrey had powers of penetration as 
well as the friend whom he was anxious to assist. 
* Reminiscences, vol. ii. pp. 40, 41. 
I C 



34 FAMOUS SCOTS 

By the month of February 1831, Carlyle's finances 
fell so low that he had only £5 in his possession, and 
expected no more for months. Then he borrowed 
;£ioo from Jeffrey, as his 'pitiful bits of periodical 
literature incomings,' as he puts it, ' having gone awry 
(as they were liable to do), but was able, I still remember 
with what satisfaction, to repay punctually within a few 
weeks ' ; adding, ' and this was all of pecuniary chivalry 
we two ever had between us.' The chivalry was all on 
the one side — of Jeffrey. The outcome of his labours 
at Craigenputtock, in addition to the fragmentary 
articles already referred to, was the essays which form 
the first three volumes of the ' Miscellanies.' They 
appeared chiefly in the Edinburgh Review, the 
Foreign Review, and Eraser's Magazine. Jeffrey's 
resignation of the editorship of the 'Review' was a 
great disappointment to Carlyle, because it stopped a 
regular source of income. 

German literature, of which Carlyle had begun a 
history, not being a 'marketable commodity,' he cut 
it up into articles. ' My last considerable bit of 
writing at Craigenputtock,' says Carlyle, ' was " Sartor 
Resartus " \ done, I think, between January and August 
1830 ; my sister Margaret had died while it was going 
on. I well remember when and how (at Templand 
one morning) the germ of it rose above ground. " Nine 
months," I used to say, " it had cost me in writing." 
Had the perpetual fluctuation, the uncertainty and un- 



THOMAS CARLYLE 35 

intelligible whimsicality of Review Editors not proved 
so intolerable, we might have lingered longer at Craigen- 
puttock, perfectly left alone, and able to do more work, 
beyond doubt, than elsewhere. But a book did seem 
to promise some respite from that, and perhaps further 
advantages. Teufelsdrockh was ready ; and (first days 
of August) I decided to make for London. Night be- 
fore going, how I still remember it ! I was lying on 
my back on the sofa in the drawing-room ; she sitting 
by the table (late at night, packing all done, I suppose) ; 
her words had a guise of sport, but were profoundly 
plaintive in meaning. "About to part, who knows for 
how long ; and what may have come in the interim ! " 
this was her thought, and she was evidently much out 
of spirits. " Courage, dearie, only for a month ! " I 
would say to her in some form or other. I went next 
morning early.' * 

Jeffrey, who was by that time Lord Advocate, 
Carlyle found much preoccupied in London, but 
willing to assist him with Murray, the bookseller. 
Jeffrey, with his wife and daughter, lived in Jermyn 
Street in lodgings, ' in melancholy contrast to the 
beautiful tenements and perfect equipments they had 
left in the north.' ' If,' says Carlyle, ' I called in the 
morning, in quest perhaps of letters (though I don't 
recollect much troubling him in that way), I would find 
the family still at breakfast, ten a.m. or later; and have 
* Reminiscences, vol. ii. pp. 161, 162. 



36 FAMOUS SCOTS 

seen poor Jeffrey emerge in flowered dressing-gown, 
with a most boiled and suffering expression of face, 
like one who had slept miserably, and now awoke 
mainly to paltry misery and bother ; poor official man ! 
" I am made a mere post-office of ! " I heard him once 
grumble, after tearing up several packets, not one of 
which was internally for himself.' * 

Mrs Carlyle joined her husband on the ist of 
October 1831, and they took lodgings at 4 Ampton 
Street, Gray's Inn Lane, with a family of the name of 
Miles, belonging to Irving's congregation. Jeffrey was 
a frequent visitor there, and sometimes the Carlyles 
called at Jermyn Street. Carlyle says that they were 
at first rather surprised that Jeffrey did not introduce 
him to some of his ' grand literary figures,' or try in 
some way to be of help to one for whom he evidently 
had a value. The explanation, Carlyle thinks, was 
that he himself ' expressed no trace of aspiration that 
way'; that Jeffrey's 'grand literary or other figures' 
were clearly by no means ' so adorable to the rustic 
hopelessly Germanised soul as an introducer of one 
might have wished.' Besides, Jeffrey was so ' heartily 
miserable,' as to think Carlyle and his other fellow- 
creatures happy in comparison, and to have no care 
left to bestow upon them. 

Here is a characteristic outburst in the ' Reminis- 
cences ' : ' The beggarly history of poor " Sartor " 
* Reminiscences, vol. ii. p. 47. 



THOMAS CARLYLE 37 

among the blockheadisms is not worth recording or 
remembering — least of all here ! In short, finding that 
whereas I had got ^100 (if memory serve) for 
" Schiller " six or seven years before, and for " Sartor," 
at least thrice as good, I could not only not get ^200, 
but even get no Murray, or the like, to publish it on 
half-profits (Murray, a most stupendous object to me ; 
tumbling about, eyeless, with the evidently strong wish 
to say " yes and no " ; my first signal experience of 
that sad human predicament) ; I said, " We will make 
it no, then ; wrap up our MS. ; wait till this Reform 
Bill uproar abate." ' * 

On Tuesday, January 26th, 1832, Carlyle received 
tidings of the death of his father. He departed on the 
Sunday morning previous 'almost without a struggle,' 
wrote his favourite sister Jane. It was a heavy stroke 
for Carlyle. ' Natural tears,' he exclaimed shortly after- 
wards, ' have come to my relief. I can look at my 
dear father, and that section of the past which he has 
made alive for me, in a certain sacred, sanctified light, 
and give way to what thoughts rise in me without 
feeling that they are weak and useless.' Carlyle 
determined that the time till the funeral was past 
(Friday) should be spent with his wife only. All 
others were excluded. He walked ' far and much,' 
chiefly in the Regent's Park, and considered about 
many things, his object being to see clearly what his 

* Reminiscences, vol. ii. p. 162. 



38 FAMOUS SCOTS 

calamity meant — what he lost, and what lesson that 
loss was to teach him. Carlyle considered his father as 
one of the most interesting men he had known. ' Were 
you to ask me,' he said, ' which had the greater natural 
faculty/ Robert Burns or my father, ' I might, perhaps, 
actually pause before replying. Burns had an in- 
finitely wider education, my father a far wholesomer. 
Besides, the one was a man of musical utterance ; the 
other wholly a man of action, with speech subservient 
thereto. Never, of all the men I have seen, has one 
come personally in my way in whom the endowment 
from nature and the arena from fortune were so utterly 
out of all proportion. I have said this often, and 
partly know it. As a man of speculation — had culture 
ever unfolded him — he must have gone wild and des- 
perate as Burns ; but he was a man of conduct, and 
work keeps all right. What strange shapeable creatures 
we are ! ' * Nothing that the elder Carlyle undertook to 
do but he did it faithfully, and like a true man. ■ I 
shall look,' said his distinguished son, ' on the houses 
he built with a certain proud interest. They stand firm 
and sound to the heart all over his little district. No 
one that comes after him will ever say, " Here was the 
finger of a hollow eye-servant" They are little texts 
for me of the gospel of man's free will. Nor will his 
deeds and sayings in any case be found unworthy — 
not false and barren, but genuine and fit. Nay, am 
* Reminiscences , vol. i. p. 19. 



THOMAS CARLYLE 39 

not I also the humble James Carlyle's work? I 
owe him much more than existence ; I owe him a 
noble inspiring example (now that I can read it in 
that rustic character). It was he exclusively that deter* 
mined on educating me ; that from his small hard- 
earned funds sent me to school and college, and made 
me whatever I am or may become. Let me not 
mourn for my father, let me do worthily of him. So 
shall he still live even here in me, and his worth plant 
itself honourably forth into new generations.' * One 
of the wise men about Ecclefechan told James Carlyle : 
1 Educate a boy, and he grows up to despise his 
ignorant parents.' His father once told Carlyle this, 
and added : ' Thou hast not done so ; God be thanked 
for it.' When James Carlyle first entered his son's 
house at Craigenputtock, Mrs Carlyle was greatly 
struck with him, • and still farther,' says her husband, 
1 opened my eyes to the treasure I possessed in a father.' 
The last time Carlyle saw his father was a few days 
before leaving for London. ' He was very kind,' wrote 
Carlyle, ' seemed prouder of me than ever. What he 
had never done the like of before, he said, on hearing me 
express something which he admired, " Man, it's surely 
a pity that thou shouldst sit yonder with nothing but 
the eye of Omniscience to see thee, and thou with such 
a gift to speak." ' In closing his affectionate tribute, 
Carlyle exclaims : ' Thank Heaven, I know and have 
* Reminiscences, vol. i. p. 6. 



4o FAMOUS SCOTS 

known what it is to be a son ; to love a father, as spirit 
can love spirit.' 

The last days of March 1832 found the Carlyles 
back at Craigenputtock. A new tenant occupied the 
farm, and their days were lonelier than ever. Mean- 
while ' Sartor Resartus ' was appearing in Fraser's 
Magazine. The Editor reported that it ' excited the 
most unqualified disapprobation.' Nothing daunted, 
Carlyle pursued the ' noiseless tenor of his way,' throw- 
ing off articles on various subjects. Finding that Mrs 
Carlyle's health suffered from the gloom and solitude 
of Craigenputtock, they removed to Edinburgh in 
January 1833. Jeffrey was absent in ' official regions,' 
and Carlyle notes that they found a ' most dreary con- 
temptible kind of element ' in Edinburgh. But their 
stay there was not without its uses, for in the Advocates' 
Library Carlyle found books which had a great effect 
upon his line of study. He collected materials for his 
articles upon ' Cagliostro ' and the ' Diamond Neck- 
lace.' At the end of four months, the Carlyles were 
back again at Craigenputtock. 

August was a bright month for Thomas Carlyle, for 
it was then that Ralph Waldo Emerson visited him at 
his rural retreat. The Carlyles thought him ' one of 
the most lovable creatures ' they had ever seen, and 
an unbroken friendship of nearly fifty years was begun. 
As winter approached, Carlyle's prospects were not 
very bright, and he once more turned his eyes towards 



THOMAS CARLYLE 41 

London, where the remainder of his life was to be 
spent. Before following him thither, it may be well to 
turn from the outer to the inner side of Carlyle's life, 
and study the forces which went to the making of his 
unique personality. 



CHAPTER III 

carlyle's mental development 

Through all the material struggles Carlyle's mind at 
Craigenputtock was gradually shaping itself round a 
theory of the Universe and Man, from which he drew 
inspiration in his future life work. Through his con- 
tributions to Magazines and Reviews there is traceable 
an original vein of thought and feeling which had its 
origin in the study of German literature. Carlyle's 
studies and musings took coherent, or, as some would 
say incoherent, shape in Sartor Resartus> — a book 
which appropriately was written in the stern solitude 
of Craigenputtock. 

In order to acquire an adequate understanding of 
Carlyle as a thinker, attention has to be paid to the 
two dominating influences of his mental life — his 
early home training and German literature. In regard 
to the former, ancestry with Carlyle counts for much. 
He came of a sturdy Covenanting stock. Carlyle 
himself has left a graphic description of the religious 
environment of the Burghers, to which sect his father 
belonged. The congregation, under the ministry of a 



THOMAS CARLYLE 43 

certain John Johnston, who taught Carlyle his first 
Latin, worshipped in a little house thatched with heath. 
Of the simple faith, the stern piety and the rugged 
heroism of the old Seceders, Carlyle himself has left a 
photograph : ' Very venerable are those old Seceder 
clergy to me now when I look back. . . . Most figures 
of them in my time were hoary old men ; men so like 
evangelists in modern vesture and poor scholars and 
gentlemen of Christ I have nowhere met with among 
Protestant or Papal clergy in any country in the world. 
. . . Strangely vivid are some twelve or twenty of those 
old faces whom I used to see every Sunday, whose names, 
employments or precise dwellingplaces I never knew, 
but whose portraits are yet clear to me as in a mirror. 
Their heavy-laden, patient, ever-attentive faces, fallen 
solitary most of them, children all away, wife away for 
ever, or, it might be, wife still there and constant like 
a shadow and grown very like the old man, the thrifty 
cleanly poverty of these good people, their well-saved 
coarse old clothes, tailed waistcoats down to mid-thigh 
— all this I occasionally see as with eyes sixty or sixty- 
five years off, and hear the very voice of my mother 
upon it, whom sometimes I would be questioning about 
these persons of the drama and endeavouring to 
describe and identify them.' And what a glimpse we 
have into the inmost heart of the primitive Covenanting 
religion in the portrait drawn by Carlyle of old David 
Hope, the farmer who refused to postpone family 



44 FAMOUS SCOTS 

worship in order to take in his grain. David was put- 
ting on his spectacles when somebody rushed in with 
the words : ' Such a raging wind risen will drive the 
stooks into the sea if let alone.' ' Wind ! ' answered 
David, 'wind canna get ae straw that has been ap- 
pointed mine. Sit down and let us worship God.' 
Far away from the simple Covenanting creed of his 
father and mother Carlyle wandered, but to the last 
the feeling of life's mystery and solemnity remained 
vivid with him, though fed from quite other sources 
than the Bible and the Shorter Catechism. 

Much has been said of Carlyle's father, but it is 
highly probable that to his mother he owed most 
during his early years. The temperament of the 
Covenanter was of the non-conductor type. Men like 
James Carlyle were essentially stern, self-centred, un- 
emotional. Fighting like the Jews, with sword in one 
hand and trowel in the other, they had no time for 
cultivating the softer side of human nature. Ready to 
go to the stake on behalf of religious liberty, they 
exercised a repressive, not to say despotic, influence in 
their own households. With them education meant 
not the unfolding of the individual powers of the 
children, but the ruthless crushing of them into a 
theological mould. Religion in such an atmosphere 
became loveless rather than lovely, and might have 
had serious influences of a reactionary nature but for 
the caressing tenderness of the mother. With a heart 



THOMAS CARLYLE 45 

which overflowed the ordinary theological boundaries, 
the mother in many sweet and hidden ways supplied 
the emotional element, which had been crushed out of 
the father by a narrow conception of life and duty. 
Carlyle's experience may be judged from his references 
to his parents. He always speaks of his father with 
profound respect and admiration ; towards his mother 
his heart goes forth with a devotion which became 
stronger as the years rolled on. Carlyle's love of his 
mother was as beautiful as it was sacred. Long after 
Carlyle had parted with the creed of his childhood, his 
heart tremulously responded to the old symbols. His 
system of thought, indeed, might well be defined as 
Calvinism minus Christianity. Had Carlyle not come 
into contact with German thought, he would probably 
have jogged along the path of literature in more or 
less conventional fashion. In fact, nothing is more 
remarkable than the comparatively commonplace nature 
of Carlyle's early contributions to literature. Germany 
touched the deepest chords of his nature. With 
German ideas and emotions his mind was saturated, 
and Sartor Resartus was the outcome. To that book 
students must go for a glance into Carlyle's mind while 
he was wrestling with the great mysteries of Existence. 
In June 182 1, as Mr Froude tells us, took place what 
may be called Carlyle's conversion — his triumph over 
his doubts, and the beginning of a new life. To 
understand this phase of Carlyle's life, we must pause 



46 FAMOUS SCOTS 

for a little to consider German literature, whence 
Carlyle derived spiritual relief and consolation. 

What, then, was the nature of the message of peace 
which Germany, through Kant, Fichte, and Goethe, 
brought to the storm-tossed soul of Carlyle? When 
Carlyle began to think seriously, two antagonistic con- 
ceptions of life, the orthodox and the rationalist, were 
struggling for mastery in the field of thought. The 
orthodox conception, into which he had been born, 
and with which his father and mother had fronted the 
Eternities, had given way under the solvent of modern 
thought. Carlyle's belief in Christianity as a revela- 
tion seems to have dropped from him without much of 
a struggle, somewhat after the style of George Eliot. 
His mental tortures appear to have arisen from spiritual 
hunger, from an inability to fill the place vacated by 
the old beliefs. Had he lived fifty years earlier, Carlyle 
would have been invited to find salvation in the easy- 
going, drawing-room rationalism of Hume and Gibbon, 
or to content himself with the ecclesiastical placidity 
known as Moderatism. 

Much had occurred since the arm-chair philosophers 
of Edinburgh taught that this was the best possible 
world, and that the highest wisdom consisted in frown- 
ing upon enthusiasm and cultivating the comfortable. 
The French Revolution had revolutionised men's 
thoughts and feelings. There had been revealed to 
man the inadequacy of the old Deistical or Mechanical 



THOMAS CARLYLE 47 

philosophy, which, spreading from England to France, 
had done so much to hasten the revolutionary epoch. 
Carlyle could find no spiritual sustenance in the purely 
mechanical theory of life which was offered as the sub- 
stitute for the theory of the Churches. There was 
another theory, which had its rise in Germany, and to 
which Carlyle clung when he could no longer keep 
hold of the Supernatural. In Transcendentalism, 
Carlyle found salvation. 

What are the leading conceptions of the German 
form of salvation? The answer to this will give the 
key to Sartor Resartus, and to Carlyle's whole mental 
outlook. In the eyes of thinkers like Carlyle, the 
great objection to Christianity was the breach it made 
between the natural and the supernatural. Between 
them there was a great gulf which could only fitfully and 
temporarily be bridged by the miraculous. Students 
who were being inoculated with scientific ideas of law 
and order, were bewildered by a theory of life which 
had no organic relation to the great germinal ideas of 
the day. In their desire to abolish the supernatural, 
the French thinkers constructed a theory of Nature in 
which everything, from the movements of solar masses 
to the movements of the soul, were interpreted in terms 
of matter. By adopting a mechanical view of the 
Universe, the French thinkers robbed Nature of much 
of its charm, and stunted the emotions on the side of 
wonder and admiration. The world was reduced to a 



48 FAMOUS SCOTS 

vast machine, man himself being simply a temporary 
embodiment of material particles in a highly complex 
and unique form. Instead of being what it was to 
the Greeks, a temple of beauty, the Universe to the 
materialist resembled a prison in which the walls gradu- 
ally closed upon the poor wretch till he was crushed 
under the ruins. Goethe has left on record the impres- 
sion made upon him by the materialistic view of life. 
As he says, ' The materialistic theory, which reduces all 
things to matter and motion, appeared to me so grey, 
so Cimmerian, and so dead that we shuddered at it as 
at a ghost.' 

Sartor Resartus is studded with vigorous protests 
against the mechanical view of Nature and Man. Just 
as distasteful to Carlyle, and equally mechanical in 
spirit, was the Deistical conception of Nature as a huge 
clock, under the superintendence of a Divine clock- 
maker, whose duty consisted in seeing that the clock 
kept good time and was in all respects thoroughly re- 
liable. The Germans attacked the problem from the 
other side. They did not abolish the supernatural 
with the materialists, or seek it in another world with 
the theologians j they found the supernatural in the 
natural. To the materialists, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, 
Hegel and Goethe had one reply : — Reduce matter to 
its constituent atoms, they argued, and you never seize 
the principle of life ; it evades you like a spirit ; in this 
principle everything lives and moves and has its being. 



THOMAS CARLYLE 49 

German philosophy from Kant has been occupied in 
attempts to trace the spiritual principle in the great 
process of cosmic evolution. In poetry, Goethe 
attempted to represent this as the energising principle 
of life and duty. The spiritual cannot be weighed in 
the scales of logic ; it refuses to be put upon the 
dissecting-table. As a consequence, the truth of things 
is best seen by the poet. The owl-like logic-chopper, 
from his mechanical and utilitarian standpoint, sees not 
the Divine vision. This has been called Pantheism. 
Call it what we please, it is contradictory to Deism and 
Materialism, and is the root thought of Sartor Resartus, 
which may be taken as Carlyle's Confession of Faith. 
A few extracts will justify the foregoing analysis. The 
transcendental view of Nature is expressed by Carlyle 
thus : — ' Atheistic science babbles poorly of it with 
scientific nomenclature, experiments and what not, as 
if it were a poor dead thing, to be bottled up in Leyden 
jars, and sold over counter ; but the native sense of 
man in all times, if he will himself apply his sense, pro- 
claims it to be a living thing — ah, an unspeakable, God- 
like thing, towards which the best attitude for us, after 
never so much science, is awe, devout prostration and 
humility of soul, worship, if not in words, then in 
silence.' Here, again, is a passage quite Hegelian in 
its tone : ' For matter, were it never so despicable, is 
Spirit ; the manifestation of Spirit, were it never so des- 
picable, cannot be more. The thing visible, nay, the 
I d 



So FAMOUS SCOTS 

thing imagined, the thing in any way conceived as 
visible, what is it but a garment, a clothing of the higher 
celestial invisible and unimaginable formless, dark with 
excess of bright.' 

The defects of Carlyle, and they are many, take 
their root in his speculative view of the Universe — a 
view which demands careful analysis if the student 
hopes to understand Carlyle's strength and weakness. 
It is not meant that Carlyle's mind remained anchored 
to the philosophic idealism of Sartor. In later days 
he professed contempt for transcendental moonshine, 
but his contempt was for the form and jargon of the 
schools, not for the spirit, which dominated Carlyle to 
the end. After Carlyle passed the early poetic stage, 
his views took more and more an anthropomorphic 
mould, till in many of his writings he seems practically 
a Theist. But at root Carlyle's thought was more 
Pantheistical than Deistical. What, then, is the 
German conception of the Ultimate Reality? The 
German answer grew out of an attempt to get rid 
of the difficulties propounded by Hume. Hume, the 
father of all the Empiricists, in giving logical effect to 
Berkeleyism, concluded that just as we know nothing 
of the outer world beyond sense impressions, so of the 
inner world of mind we know nothing beyond mental 
impressions. We can combine and recombine these 
impressions as we choose, but from them we cannot 
deduce any ultimate laws, either of the world or of 



THOMAS CARLYLE 51 

mind. Hume would not sanction belief in causation 
as a universal law. All that could be said was that 
certain things happened in a certain manner so fre- 
quently as to give rise to a law of expectation. But 
this is not to solve, but to evade the problem ? We 
are still driven to ask, What is matter? What is 
motion ? What is force ? How do we get our know- 
ledge of the material world, and is that knowledge 
reliable ? These are wide questions that cannot be 
adequately handled here. It was a favourite argument 
of Comte and his followers, that man's first conceptions 
of Nature were necessarily erroneous, because they 
were anthropomorphic. Theology was, therefore, 
dethroned without ceremony. But science is as 
anthropomorphic as theology. We have no guarantee 
that the great facts of Nature are as we think them. 
We talk of Force, but our idea of Force is taken from 
experiences which may have no counterpart in Nature. 
It is well known, for example, that the secondary 
qualities of objects, colour, &c, do not exist in 
Nature. Our personality is so inextricably mixed with 
the material universe that it is impossible to formulate 
a philosophy like Naturalism, which makes mind a 
product of Nature, and which sharply defines the 
provinces of the two. 

But what Naturalism fails to do, Idealism or Tran- 
scendentalism promises to perform. Idealism is simply 
Materialism turned upside down. The only difference 



52 FAMOUS SCOTS 

between the evolution of Spencer and of Hegel is that 
the one puts matter, the other mind, first. For all 
practical purposes, it signifies little whether mind is 
the temporary embodiment of an idea, or the tem- 
porary product of a highly specialised form of matter. 
In either case, man has no more freedom than the 
bubble upon the surface of the stream. We may 
discourse of the bubble as poetically or as practically 
as we please, the result is the same — absorption in the 
universal. Hegelianism as much as Naturalism leaves 
man a prisoner in the hands of Fate. The only 
difference is, that while Naturalism puts round the 
prisoner's neck a plain, unpretentious noose, Hegeli- 
anism adds fringes and embroidery. If there is no 
appeal from Nature's dread sentence, the less poetry 
and embroidery there is about the doleful business the 
better. 

In Sartor Resartus, Carlyle talks finely but vaguely, 
of the peace which came over his soul when he dis- 
covered that the universe was not mechanical but 
Divine. The peace was not of long duration. What 
consolation Carlyle derived from Idealism did not 
appear in his life. What a contrast between the poetic 
optimism of Sartor and the heavily-charged pessimism 
of old age, when Carlyle, with wailing pathos, exclaims 
that God does nothing. Carlyle's life abundantly 
illustrates the fact that whenever it leaves cloudland, 
Idealism sinks into scepticism more bitter and gloomy 



THOMAS CARLYLE 53 

than the unbelief of Naturalism. Carlyle approached 
the question of the Ultimate Reality from the wrong 
standpoint. He had no reasoned philosophic creed. 
A poet, he had the poetic dread of analysis, and his 
spirit revolted at the spectacle of Nature on the dissect- 
ing-table. He waged a life-long warfare against science. 
As the present writer has elsewhere remarked : — 
' Carlyle never could tolerate the evolution theory. 
He always spoke with the utmost contempt of Darwin, 
and everything pertaining to the development doctrines. 
It is somewhat startling to find that Carlyle was an 
evolutionist without knowing it. The antagonism 
between Carlyle and Spencer disappears on closer 
inspection. When Carlyle speaks of the universe as in 
very truth the star-domed city of God, and reminds us 
that through every crystal and through every grass 
blade, but most through every living soul, the glory of 
a present God still beams, he is simply saying in the 
language of poetry what Spencer says in the language 
of science, that the world of phenomena is sustained 
and energised by an infinite Eternal Power. Evolution 
is as emphatic as Carlyle on the absolute distinction 
between right and wrong. Carlyle and all the 
German school confront the evolutionary ethics with the 
Kantian categorical imperative. Surely the Evolution- 
ists in the matter of an imperative out-rival the Intui- 
tionalists, when, in addition to the dictates of con- 
science, they can call as a witness and sanction to 



54 FAMOUS SCOTS 

morality the testimony of all-embracing experience. 
In his famous saying, Might is Right, Carlyle was 
unconsciously formulating one aspect of evolutionary 
ethics. Carlyle did not mean anything so silly as 
that brute force and ethical sanctions are identical ; 
what he meant was that in the long run Righteousness 
will prove the mightiest force in the universe. What is 
this but another version of the Spencerian doctrine of 
the survival of the fittest, which, in the most highly 
evolved state of society, will mean the survival of the 
best? In the highest social state the only Might 
that will survive will be the Might which is rooted in 
Right. Carlyle's contemptuous attitude towards 
science is deeply to be deplored. He waged bitter 
warfare against the evolution theory, quite oblivious 
of the fact that by means of it there was revealed 
a deeper insight into the Power behind Nature, and 
into the ethical constitution of the universe, than ever 
entered into the minds of transcendental philoso- 
phers.' 

It is taken for granted that Carlyle's thoughts have 
no organic unity. He is looked upon as a stimulat- 
ing, but confused, writer, as a thinker of original, but 
incoherent, power. True, he has not a logical mind, 
and pays no deference to the canons of the schools or 
the market-place. But there is a method in Carlyle's 
apparent caprice. When analysed, his thoughts are 
discovered to have unity. His transcendentalism em- 



THOMAS CARLYLE 55 

braces the ethic as well as the cosmic side of life. In 
the sphere of morals, as of science, his writings are one 
long tumultuous protest against the mechanical philo- 
sophy and the utilitarian theory of morals. From 
his essay on Voltaire we take the following : — • It is 
contended by many that our mere love of personal 
Pleasure or Happiness, as it is called, acting in every 
individual with such clearness as he may easily have, 
will of itself lead him to respect the rights of others, 
and wisely employ his own. . . . Without some belief 
in the necessary eternal, or, which is the same thing, 
in the supra mundane divine nature of Virtue exist- 
ing in each individual, could the moral judgment of 
a thousand or a thousand thousand individuals avail 
us ' ? More picturesquely, Carlyle denounces the 
utilitarian system in these words : ' What then ? Is 
the heroic inspiration we name Virtue but some 
passion, some bubble of the blood, bubbling in the 
direction others profit by ? I know not ; only this I 
know. If what thou namest Happiness be our true 
aim, then are we all astray. With Stupidity and sound 
Digestion, man may front much. But what in these 
dull, unimaginative days are the terrors of conscience 
to the diseases of the Liver? Not on Morality, but 
on Cookery, let us build our stronghold : there, 
brandishing our frying-pan as censer, let us offer sweet 
incense to the Devil, and live at ease on the fat things 
he has provided for his Elect ' ! The exponent of such 



56 FAMOUS SCOTS 

a theory of ethics will have a natural distaste for the 
rational or calculating side of conduct. He will de- 
preciate the mechanical, and give undue emphasis to 
the inspirational. His heroes will be not men of placid 
temperament, methodical habits, and utilitarian aims, 
but men of mystical and passionate natures, spasmodic 
in action, and guided by ideas not easily justified at 
the bar of utility. 

Just as in the sphere of speculative thought, he has 
profound contempt for the Diderots and Voltaires, with 
their mechanical views of the Universe, so in practical 
affairs Carlyle has contempt for the men who endea- 
vour to further their aims by appealing to common- 
place motives by means of commonplace methods. 
Specially opposed is he to the tendency of the age 
to rely for progress, not upon appeals to the great 
elemental forces of human nature, but upon organisa- 
tions, committees, and all kinds of mechanism. In his 
remarkable essay, ' Signs of the Times,' we have ample 
verification of our exposition. After talking depreciat- 
ingly of the mechanical tendency of the prevailing 
philosophies, Carlyle comments upon the mechanical 
nature of the reforming agencies of civilisation. The 
intense Egoism of his nature rebels against any kind of 
Socialism or Collectivism. He says : ' Were we re- 
quired to characterise this age of ours by any single 
epithet, we should be tempted to call it, not a Heroical, 
Devotional, Philosophical, or Heroic Age, but, above 



THOMAS CARLYLE 57 

all, the Mechanical Age. It is the age of machinery 
in every outward and inward sense of that word. . . . 
Men are grown mechanical in head and heart, as well 
as in hand. They have lost faith in individual en- 
deavour, and in natural force of any kind. . . . We 
may trace this tendency in all the great manifestations 
of our time : in its intellectual aspect, the studies it 
most favours, and its manner of conducting them ; in 
its practical aspects, its politics, art, religious work ; 
in the whole sources, and throughout the whole current 
of its spiritual, no less than its material, activity.' 
With Carlyle the secrets of Nature and Life were dis- 
coverable, not so much by the intellect as by the heart. 
The man with the large heart, rather than the clear 
head, saw furthest into the nature of things. The 
history of German thought is strewn with the wreck of 
systems based upon the Carlylian doctrine of intuition. 
Schelling and Hegel showed the puerility to which great 
men are driven when they started to construct science 
out of their own intuitions, instead of patiently and 
humbly sitting down to study Nature. Tyndall has left 
on record his gratitude to Carlyle. Tyndall had grip 
of the scientific method, and was able to allow Carlyle's 
inspiration to play upon his mind without fear of harm ; 
but how many waverers has Carlyle driven from the 
path of reason into the bogs of mysticism ? 

Carlyle's impatience with reasoning and his deter- 
mination to follow the promptings of a priori concep- 



58 FAMOUS SCOTS 

tions gave his system of ethics a one-sided cast, and 
made him needlessly aggressive towrds what in his 
day was called Utilitarianism, but what has now come 
to be known as Evolutionary Ethics. What is the 
chief end of man considered as a moral agent? The 
answer of the Christian religion is as intelligible as it 
is comprehensive. Man's duty consists in obeying the 
laws of God revealed in Nature and in the Bible. But 
apart from revelation, where is the basis of ethical 
authority? Debarred from accepting the Christian 
view, and instinctively repelled from Utilitarianism, 
Carlyle found refuge in the Fichtean and similar sys- 
tems of ethics. By substituting Blessedness for Happi- 
ness as the aim of ethical endeavour, Carlyle en- 
deavoured to preserve the heroic attitude which was 
associated with Supernaturalism. In his view, it was 
more consistent with human dignity to trust for in- 
spiration to a light within than painfully to piece to- 
gether fragments of human experience and ponder the 
inferences to be drawn therefrom. 

In his ' Data of Ethics,' Herbert Spencer shows the 
hollowness of Carlyle's distinction between Blessedness 
and Happiness. As Spencer puts it : ' Obviously the 
implication is that Blessedness is not a kind of Happi- 
ness, and this implication at once suggests the question, 
What mode of feeling is this ? If it is a state of con- 
sciousness at all, it is necessarily one of three states — 
painful, indifferent, or pleasurable If the plea- 



THOMAS CARLYLE 59 

surable states are in excess, then the blessed life can be 
distinguished from any other pleasurable life only by 
the relative amount or the quality of its pleasures. It 
is a life which makes happiness of a certain kind and 
degree its end, and the assumption that blessedness is 

not a form of happiness lapses In brief, 

blessedness has for its necessary condition of existence 
increased happiness, positive or negative in some con- 
sciousness or other ; and disappears utterly if we assume 
that the actions called blessed are known to cause de- 
crease of happiness in others as well as in the actor.' 

To German philosophy and literature Carlyle owed 
his critical method, by which he all but revolutionised 
criticism as understood by his Edinburgh and London 
contemporaries. Carlyle began his apprenticeship with 
the Edinburgh Reviewers, in whose hand criticism 
never lost its political bias. Apart from that, criticism 
up till the time of Carlyle was mainly statical. The 
critic was a kind of literary book-keeper who went upon 
the double-entry system. On one page were noted ex- 
cellences, on the other defects, and when the two 
columns were totalled the debtor and creditor side of 
the transaction was set forth. Where, as in the cases 
of Burns and Byron, genius was complicated with 
moral aberration, anything like a correct estimate was 
impossible. The result was that in Scotland criticism 
oscillated between the ethical severity of the pulpit and 
the daring laxity of free thought. As the Edinburgh 



60 FAMOUS SCOTS 

Reviewers could not afford to set the clergy at defi- 
ance, they had to pay due respect to conventional 
tastes and standards. Carlyle faced the question from 
a different standpoint. He introduced into criticism 
the dynamic principle which he found in the Germans, 
particularly in Goethe. In contemplating a work of 
Art, the Germans talk much of the importance of 
seizing upon the creative spirit, what Hegel called the 
Idea. The thought of Goethe and Hegel, though 
differently expressed, resolves itself into the concep- 
tion of a life principle which shapes materials into 
harmony with innate forms. In the sphere of life the 
determining factors are the inner vitalities, which, how- 
ever, are susceptible to the environment. The critic 
who would realise his ideal does not go about with 
literary and ethical tape-lines : he seeks to understand 
the spirit which animated the author as shewn in his 
works and his life, and then studies the influence of his 
environment. That this is a correct description of 
Carlyle's critical method is evidenced by his own re- 
marks in his essay on Burns. He says : ' If an in- 
dividual is really of consequence enough to have his 
life and character recorded for public remembrance, 
we have always been of opinion that the public ought 
to be made acquainted with all the springs and rela- 
tions of his character. How did the world and man's 
life from his particular position represent themselves 
to his mind? How did co-existing circumstances 



THOMAS CARLYLE 61 

modify him from without : how did he modify these 
from within ? ' 

This attention to the inner springs of character gives 
the key to Carlyle's critical work. How fruitful this 
was is seen in his essay on Burns. He steered an 
even course between the stern moralists, whose indig- 
nation at the sins of Burns the man blinded them to 
the genius of Burns the poet, and the flippant Bohemi- 
ans, who thought that by bidding defiance to the con- 
ventionalities and moralities Burns proved his title to 
the name of genius, and whose voices are yet unduly 
with us in much spirituous devotion and rhymeless 
doggerel at the return of each 25th of January. While 
laying bare the springs of Burns' genius, Carlyle, with 
unerring precision, also puts his finger on the weak 
point in the poet's moral nature. So faithfully did 
Carlyle apply his critical method that he may 
be considered to have said the final word about 
Burns. 

When Goethe spoke of Carlyle as a great moral 
force he must have had in his mind the ethical tone 
of Carlyle's critical writing — a tone which had its roots 
in the idea that judgment upon a man should be deter- 
mined, not by isolated deviations from conventional or 
even ethical standards, but by consideration of the 
deep springs of character from which flow aspirations 
and ideals. In his Heroes and Hero- Worship Carlyle 
elaborates his critical theory thus : ' On the whole, we 



62 FAMOUS SCOTS 

make too much of faults ; the details of the business 
hide the real centre of it. Faults ? The greatest of 
faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none. 
Readers of the Bible above all, one would think, 
might know better. Who is called there "the man 
according to God's own heart ? " David, the Hebrew 
King, had fallen into sins enough — blackest crimes — 
there was no want of sins. And thereupon the un- 
believers sneer and ask : Is this your man according 
to God's heart ? The sneer, I must say, seems to me 
but a shallow one. What are faults ? What are the 
outward details of a life, if the inner secret of it, 
the remorse, temptations, true, often-baffled, never- 
ended struggle of it, be forgotten? .... The dead- 
liest sin, I say, were that same supercilious con- 
sciousness of no sin : that is death David's 

life and history, as written for us in those Psalms 
of his, I consider to be the truest emblem ever 
given of a man's moral progress and warfare here 
below.' 

This canon faithfully applied enabled Carlyle to in- 
vest with a new and living interest large sections of 
literary criticism. Burns, Johnson, Cromwell and 
others of like calibre, were rescued by Carlyle from the 
hands of Pedants and Pharisees. To readers wearied 
with the facile criticism of conventional reviewers, it 
was a revelation to come into contact with a 
writer like Carlyle, who not only gave to the mind 



THOMAS CARLYLE 63 

great inspirational impetus, but also a larger critical 
outlook; it was like stepping out of a museum, or 
a dissecting-room into the free, fresh, breezy air of 
Nature. 

Moreover, Carlyle's interest in the soul is not of an 
antiquarian nature ; he studies his heroes as if they 
were ancestors of the Carlyle family. He broods over 
their letters as if they were the letters of his own flesh 
and blood, and his comments resemble the soliloquis- 
ings of a pathetic stricken kinsman rather than the 
conscious reflections of a literary man. It is note- 
worthy that Carlyle's critical powers are limited by his 
sympathies. His method, though suggestive of scien- 
tific criticism, is largely influenced by the personal 
equation. Face to face with writers like Scott and 
Voltaire, he flounders in helpless incompetency. He 
tries Scott, the writer of novels, by purely Puritan 
standards. Because there is in Scott no signs of soul- 
struggles, no conscious devotion to heroic ends, no 
introspective torturings, Carlyle sets himself to a pro- 
cess of belittling. So with Voltaire. Carlyle's failure 
in this sphere was due to the fact that he overdid the 
ethical side of criticism and became a pulpiteer; he 
was false to his own principle of endeavouring to seize 
the dominant idea. Because Scott and Voltaire were 
not dominated by the Covenanting idea, Carlyle dealt 
with them in a tone of disparagement. Carlyle admired 
Goethe, but he certainly made no attempt to cultivate 



64 FAMOUS SCOTS 

Goethe's catholicity. Let us not fall into Carlyle's 
mistake, and condemn him for qualities which were 
incompatible with his temperament. After all has 
been said, English literature stands largely indebted 
to Carlyle the critic. 



CHAPTER IV 

LIFE IN LONDON 

Mrs Carlyle entered heartily into her husband's pro- 
posal to remove to London. ' Burn our ships ! ' she 
gaily said to him one day {i.e., dismantle the house) ; 
' carry all our furniture with us ' ; which they accord- 
ingly did. ' At sight of London,' Carlyle wrote, ' I 
remember humming to myself a ballad-stanza of 
"Johnnie o' Braidislea," which my dear old mother 
used to sing, 

" For there's seven foresters in yon forest ; 
And them I want to see, see, 
And them I want to see (and shoot down) ! " 

Carlyle lodged at Ampton Street again ; but pre- 
sently did ' immense stretches of walking in search of 
houses.' He found his way to Chelsea and there 
secured a small old-fashioned house at 5 (now num- 
bered 24) Cheyne Row, at a rent of ^35 a year. 
Mrs Carlyle followed in a short time and approved of 
his choice. They took possession on the 10th June 
1834, and Carlyle recounts the 'cheerful gipsy life' 
they had there 'among the litter and carpenters for 
three incipient days.' Leigh Hunt was in the next 
1 e 6 s 



66 FAMOUS SCOTS 

street ' sending kind, z^zpractical messages,' dropping 
in to see them in the evenings. 

When in London on a former occasion, Carlyle be- 
came acquainted with John Stuart Mill, and the 
intimacy was kept alive by correspondence to and 
from Craigenputtock. It was through Mill's letters 
that Carlyle's thoughts were turned towards the French 
Revolution. When he returned to London, Mill was 
very useful to him, lending him a fine collection of 
books on that subject. Mill's evenings in Cheyne Row 
were ' sensibly agreeable for most part,' remarks Car- 
lyle. 'Talk rather wintry (" sawdustish," as old 
Sterling once called it), but always well-informed and 
sincere.' Carlyle was making rapid progress with the 
first volume of his French Revolution. Stern necessity 
gave a spurt to his pen, for in February 1835 he notes 
that ' some twenty-three months ' had passed since he 
earned a single penny by the ' craft of literature.' The 
volume was completed and he lent the only copy to 
Mill. The MS. was unfortunately burnt by a ser- 
vant-maid. ' How well do I still remember,' writes 
Carlyle in his Reminiscences, ' that night when he came 
to tell us, pale as Hector's ghost. ... It was like half 
sentence of death to us both, and we had to pretend to 
take it lightly, so dismal and ghastly was his horror at 
it, and try to talk of other matters. He stayed three 
mortal hours or so ; his departure quite a relief to us. 
Oh, the burst of sympathy my poor darling then gave 



THOMAS CARLYLE 67 

me, flinging her arms round my neck, and openly 
lamenting, condoling, and encouraging like a nobler 
second self! Under heaven is nothing beautifuller. 
We sat talking till late ; ' shall be written again,' my 
fixed word and resolution to her. Which proved to be 
such a task as I never tried before or since. I wrote 
out "Feast of Pikes" (Vol. II.), and then went at it. 
Found it fairly impossible for about a fortnight ; passed 
three weeks (reading Marryat's novels), tried, cautious- 
cautiously, as on ice paper-thin, once more ; and in 
short had a job more like breaking my heart than any 
other in my experience. Jeannie, alone of beings, 
burnt like a steady lamp beside me. I forget how 
much of money we still had. I think there was at first 
something like ^300, perhaps ^280, to front London 
with. Nor can I in the least remember where we had 
gathered such a sum, except that it was our own, no 
part of it borrowed or given us by anybody. " Fit to 
last till French Revolution is ready ! " and she had no 
misgivings at all. Mill was penitently liberal ; sent 
me ^200 (in a day or two), of which I kept ^100 
(actual cost of house while I had written burnt volume) ; 
upon which he bought me " Biographie Universelle," 
which I got bound, and still have. Wish I could find 
a way of getting the now much macerated, changed, 
and fanaticised John Stuart Mill to take that ;£ioo 
back ; but I fear there is no way.' * 

* Reminiscences, vol. ii. pp. 178-79. 



68 FAMOUS SCOTS 

Carlyle went diligently to work at the French Revolu- 
tion. Some conviction he had that the book was worth 
something. Once or twice among the flood of equipages 
at Hyde Park Corner, when taking his afternoon stroll, 
he thought to himself, ' Perhaps none of you could do 
what I am at ! ' But generally his feeling was, ' I shall 
finish this book, throw it at your feet, buy a rifle and 
spade, and withdraw to the Transatlantic Wilderness, 
far from human beggaries and basenesses ! ' ' This,' 
he says, ' had a kind of comfort to me ; yet I always 
knew too, in the background, that this would not prac- 
tically do. In short, my nervous system had got dread- 
fully irritated and inflamed before I quite ended, and 
my desire was intense, beyond words, to have done 
with it.' Then he adds : ' The last paragraph I well 
remember writing upstairs in the drawing-room that 
now is, which was then my writing-room ; beside her 
there and in a grey evening (summer, I suppose), soon 
after tea (perhaps) ; thereupon, with her dear blessing 
on me, going out to walk. I had said before going 
out, " What they will do with this book, none knows, 
my Jeannie, lass ; but they have not had, for a two 
hundred years, any book that came more truly from a 
man's very heart, and so let them trample it under foot 
and hoof as they see best ! " " Pooh, pooh ! they can- 
not trample that ! " she would cheerily answer ; for her 
own approval (I think she had read always regularly 
behind me) especially in Vol. III., was strong and 



THOMAS CARLYLE 69 

decided.' Mrs Carlyle was right. No critic or clique 
of critics could trample the French Revolution. 

A month before the completion of the first book of 
the French Revolution, Carlyle wrote in his journal : 
1 My first friend Edward Irving is dead. I am friend- 
less here or as good as that.' In a week or two there- 
after he met Southey, whom he describes as a ' lean, 
grey, white-headed man of dusky complexion, unex- 
pectedly tall when he rises and still leaner then — the 
shallowest chin, prominent snubbed Roman nose, small 
carelined brow, huge bush of white grey hair on high 
crown and projecting on all sides, the most vehement 
pair of faint hazel eyes I have ever seen — a well-read, 
honest, limited (straitlaced even), kindly-hearted, most 
irritable man. We parted kindly, with no great purpose 
on either side, I imagine, to meet again.'* Later on 
Carlyle admits to his brother John that his prospects 
in London were not brightening ; which fact left him 
gloomy and morose. 

During his enforced leisure after the destruction of 
the first book of the French Revolution, Carlyle saw 
more of his friends, among whom he numbered John 
Sterling, fresh from Cambridge and newly ordained 
a clergyman. Sterling was of a 'vehement but most 
noble nature,' and he was one of the few who had 
studied Sartor Resartus seriously. He had been also 
caught by the Radical epidemic on the spiritual side. 
* Froude's ' Life in London,' vol. i. p. 20. 



70 FAMOUS SCOTS 

Although dissenting from much of what Carlyle 
taught, Sterling recognised in him ' a man not only 
brilliantly gifted, but differing from the common run of 
people in this, that he would not lie, that he would not 
equivocate, that he would say always what he actually 
thought, careless whether he pleased or offended.' He 
introduced Carlyle to his father, who was then the 
' guiding genius ' of the Times, and who offered Carlyle 
work there on the usual conditions. ' Carlyle,' says 
Froude, ' though with poverty at his door, and entire 
penury visible in the near future, turned away from a 
proposal which might have tempted men who had less 
excuse for yielding to it. He was already the sworn 
soldier of another chief. His allegiance from first to 
last was to truth, truth as it presented itself to his own 
intellect and his own conscience.' 

On the 1 6th of February 1835 Carlyle wrote to his 
brother John : ' I positively do not care that periodical 
literature shuts her fist against me in these months. 
Let her keep it shut for ever, and go to the devil, 
which she mostly belongs to. The matter had better 
be brought to a crisis. There is perhaps a finger of 
Providence in it. . . . My only new scheme, since last 
letter, is a hypothesis — little more yet — about National 
Education. The newspapers had an advertisement 
about a Glasgow " Educational Association " which 
wants a man that would found a Normal School, first 
going over England and into Germany to get light on 



THOMAS CARLYLE 71 

that matter. I wrote to that Glasgow Association afar 
off, enquiring who they were, what manner of man they 
expected, testifying myself very friendly to their project, 
and so forth — no answer as yet. It is likely they 
will want, as Jane says, a " Chalmers and Welsh " kind 
of character, in which case Va ben, felice ?iotte. If other- 
wise, and they (almost by miracle) had the heart, I am 
the man for them. Perhaps my name is so heterodox 
in that circle, I shall not hear at all.' * Carlyle also 
remarks, in the same letter, that John Stuart Mill is 
very friendly : ' He is the nearest approach to a real 
man that I find here — nay, as far as negativeness goes, 
he is that man, but unhappily not very satisfactory 
much farther.' 

Not long thereafter Carlyle met Wordsworth. ' I 
did not expect much,' he said in a letter, ' but got 
mostly what I expected. The old man has a fine 
shrewdness and naturalness in his expression of face, a 
long Cumberland figure ; one finds also a kind of 
sincerity in his speech. But for prolixity, thinness, 
endless dilution, it excels all the other speech I had 
heard from mortals. A genuine man, which is much, 
but also essentially a small, genuine man.' 

Early in October 1835 Carlyle started for his old 

home. His mother-in-law had arrived on a visit at 

Cheyne Row, and remained there with her daughter 

during Carlyle's absence in Scotland. He returned 

* Froude's ' Life in London,' vol. i. p. 24. 



72 FAMOUS SCOTS 

improved in health and spirits. Nothing came of the 
National Education scheme. Carlyle was not a person 
to push himself into notice, remarks Froude ; and his 
friends did not exert themselves for him, or they tried 
and failed ; ' governments, in fact, do not look out for 
servants among men who are speculating about the 
nature of the Universe. Then, as always, the doors 
leading into regular employment remained closed.' 
Shortly after his return from the North, he was offered 
the editorship of a newspaper at Lichfield. This was 
unaccepted for the same reason that weighed with him 
when he refused a post on the Times. In the follow- 
ing summer money matters had become so pressing 
that Carlyle wrote the article on Mirabeau, now printed 
among the Miscellanies, for Mill's review, which brought 
him ^50. Mrs Carlyle's health began to suffer, and a 
visit to Annandale became imperative. She returned 
1 mended in spirits.' Writing of her arrival in London, 
she said : ' I had my luggage put on the backs of two 
porters, and walked on to Cheapside, when I presently 
found a Chelsea omnibus. By-and-bye the omnibus 
stopped, and amid cries of " No room, sir ; can't get 
in," Carlyle's face, beautifully set off by a broad- 
brimmed white hat, gazed in at the door like the 
peri " who, at the gate of heaven, stood disconsolate." 
In hurrying along the Strand, his eye had lighted 
on my trunk packed on the top of the omnibus, and 
had recognised it. This seems to me one of the 



THOMAS CARLYLE 73 

most indubitable proofs of genius which he ever 
manifested.' 

On the 22nd of January 1837 Carlyle wrote to his 
mother : ' The book [French Revolution} is actually 
done ; all written to the last line ; and now, after 
much higgling and maffling, the printers have got 
fairly afloat, and we are to go on with the wind and 
the sea.' But no money could be expected from the 
book for a considerable time. Meanwhile, Miss 
Harriet Martineau (who had introduced herself into 
Cheyne Row), and Miss Wilson, another accomplished 
friend, thought that Carlyle should begin a course of 
lectures in London, and thereby raise a little money. 
Carlyle, it seems, gave ' a grumbling consent.' Nothing 
daunted, the ladies found two hundred persons ready 
each to subscribe a guinea to hear a course of lectures 
from him. The end of it was that he delivered six 
discourses on German literature, which were ' excellent 
in themselves, and delivered with strange impressive- 
ness,' and ^135 went into his purse. 

In the summer the French Revolution appeared. 
The sale at first was slow, almost nothing, for it was 
not ' subscribed for ' among the booksellers. Alluding 
to the criticisms which appeared, Carlyle said : ' Some 
condemn me, as is very natural, for affectation ; others 
are hearty, even passionate, in their estimation j on the 
whole, it strikes me as not unlikely that the book may 
take some hold of the English people, and do them 



74 FAMOUS SCOTS 

and itself a little good.' He was right. Other his- 
torians have described the Revolution : Carlyle repro- 
duces the Revolution. He approaches history like a 
dramatist. Give him, as in the French Revolution, 
a weird, tragic, awe-inspiring theme, and he will 
utilise his characters, scenes, and circumstances in 
artistic subordination to the central idea. Carlyle 
might be called a subjective dramatist — that is to say, 
his own spirit, thoughts, and reflections get so mixed 
up with the history that it is difficult to imagine the one 
without the other. Every now and then the dramatist 
interrupts the tragedy to interject his own reflections ; 
in the history the Carlylean philosophy plays the part 
of a Greek chorus. As an example of Carlyle's genius 
for a dramatic situation, take his opening of the great 
drama with the death scene of Louis XV. Who does 
not feel, in reading that scene, as if the Furies were 
not far off? who does not detect in the grotesque 
jostling of the comedy and tragedy of life premonitions 
of the coming storm ? 

1 But figure his thought, when Death is now clutch- 
ing at his own heart-strings ; unlooked for, inexorable ! 
Yes, poor Louis, Death has found thee. No palace 
walls or lifeguards, gorgeous tapestries or gilt buckram 
of stiffest ceremonial could keep him out ; but he is 
here, here at thy very life-breath, and will extinguish it. 
Thou, whose whole existence hitherto was a chimera and 
scenic show, at length becomest a reality ; sumptuous 



THOMAS CARLYLE 75 

Versailles bursts asunder, like a dream, into void 
Immensity : Time is done, and all the scaffolding 
of Time falls wrecked with hideous clangour round 
thy soul : the pale Kingdoms yawn open ; there must 
thou enter, naked, all unking'd, and await what is 
appointed thee ! . . . . There are nods and sagacious 
glances, go-betweens, silk dowagers mysteriously glid- 
ing, with smiles for this constellation, sighs for that : 
there is tremor, of hope or desperation, in several 
hearts. There is the pale, grinning Shadow of Death, 
ceremoniously ushered along by another grinning 
Shadow, of Etiquette ; at intervals the growl of Chapel 
Organs, like prayer by machinery ; proclaiming, as in 
a kind of horrid diabolic horse-laughter, Vanity of 
vanities, all is Vanity /' 

At every stage in the narrative, the reader is im- 
pressed with the dramatic texture of Carlyle's mind. 
No dramatic writer surpasses him in the art of produc- 
ing effects by contrasts. In the midst of a vigorous 
description of the storming of the Bastille, he rings 
down the curtain for a moment in order to introduce 
the following scene of idyllic beauty : ' O evening sun 
of July, how, at this hour, thy beams fall slant on 
reapers amid peaceful woody fields ; on old women 
spinning in cottages ; on ships far out in the silent 
main ; on Balls at the Orangerie of Versailles, where 
high-rouged Dames of the Palace are even now 
dancing with double-jacketed Hussar officers; — and 



7 6 FAMOUS SCOTS 

also on this roaring Hell-porch of a Hotel-de- 
Ville ! ' 

Equally effective is Carlyle in rendering vivid the 
doings of the individual actors in the drama. For 
photographic minuteness and startling realism what 
can equal the following : — ' But see Camille Des- 
moulins, from the Cafe - de Foy, rushing out, sibylline 
in face ; his hair streaming, in each hand a pistol ! 
He springs to a table : the police satellites are eyeing 
him ; alive they shall not take him, not they alive him 
alive. This time he speaks without stammering : — 
Friends ! shall we die like hunted hares ? Like sheep 
hounded into their pinfold ; bleating for mercy, where 
is no mercy, but only a whetted knife ? The hour is 
come, the supreme hour of Frenchman and Man ; 
when Oppressors are to try conclusions with Oppressed ; 
and the word is, swift Death, or Deliverance forever. 
Let such hour be well-come ! Us, meseems, one cry 
only befits : To Arms ! Let universal Paris, universal 
France, as with the throat of the whirlwind, sound 
only : To arms ! — " To arms ! " yell responsive the 
innumerable voices ; like one great voice, as of a 
Demon yelling from the air : for all faces wax fire- 
eyed, all hearts burn up into madness. In such, or 
fitter words does Camille evoke the Elemental Powers, 
in this great moment — " Friends," continues Camille, 
" some rally ing-sign ! Cockades ; green ones — the 
colour of Hope ! " — As with the flight of locusts, 



THOMAS CARLYLE 77 

these green tree-leaves ; green ribands from the neigh- 
bouring shops : all green things are snatched, and 
made cockades of. Camille descends from his table ; 
" stifled with embraces, wetted with tears ; " has a bit of 
green riband handed him ; sticks it in his hat. And 
now to Curtius' Image-shop there ; to the Boulevards ; 
to the four winds, and rest not till France be on fire ! ' 
As a historical work, the French Revolution is 
unique. It is precisely the kind of book Isaiah 
would have written had there been a like Revolution in 
the Jewish kingdom ; and just as we go to Isaiah, not 
for sociological guidance, but for ethical inspiration, so 
we turn to the French Revolution when the mind and 
heart are in a state of torpor in order to get a series of 
shocks from the Carlylean electric battery. From a 
historian a student expects light as well as heat, 
guidance as well as inspiration. It is not enough to 
have the great French explosion vividly photographed 
before his eyes ; it is equally necessary to know the 
causes which led to the catastrophe. Here, as a 
historian, Carlyle is conspicuously weak. His habit of 
looking for dramatic situations, his passion for making 
commonplace incidents and commonplace men merely 
the satellites of commanding personalities, in a word, 
his theory that history should deal with the doings 
of great men, prevents Carlyle from dwelling upon the 
politico-economic side of national life. So absorbed is 
he in painting the Revolution, that he forgets to explair 



78 FAMOUS SCOTS 

the Revolution. We have abundance of vague decla- 
mations against shams in high places, plenty of talk 
about God's judgments, in the style of the Hebrew 
prophets, but of patient diagnosis, there is none. As 
Mr Morley puts it in his luminous essay on Carlyle : 
' To the question whether mankind gained or lost by 
the French Revolution, Carlyle nowhere gives a clear 
answer ; indeed, on this subject more than any other, 
he clings closely to his favourite method of simple 

presentation, streaked with dramatic irony He 

draws its general moral lesson from the Revolution, 
and with clangorous note warns all whom it concerns 
from King to Church that imposture must come to an 
end. But for the precise amount and kind of dissolu- 
tion which the West owes to it, for the political mean- 
ing of it, as distinguished from its moral or its dramatic 
significance, we seek in vain, finding no word on the 
subject, nor even evidence of consciousness that such 
word is needed.' Had Carlyle, in addition to his 
genius as a historical dramatist, possessed the patient 
diagnosing power of the writers and thinkers whom he 
derided, his French Revolution would have taken its 
place in historical literature as an epoch-making book. 
As it stands, the reader who desires to have an intelli- 
gible knowledge of the subject, is compelled to shake 
himself free of the Carlylean mesmerism, and have 
recourse to those writers whom Carlyle, under the 
c opprobious names of ' logic-choppers ' and ' dry-as- 
ts,' held up to public ridicule. 



CHAPTER V 

HOLIDAY JOURNEYINGS — LITERARY WORK 

Carlyle was so broken down with his efforts upon the 
Fre?ich Revolution that a trip to Annandale became 
necessary. He stayed at Scotsbrig two months, 
' wholly idle, reading novels, smoking pipes in the 
garden with his mother, hearing notices of his book 
from a distance, but not looking for them or caring 
about them.' Autumn brought Carlyle back to Cheyne 
Row, when he found his wife in better health, de- 
lighted to have him again at her side. She knew, as 
Froude points out, though Carlyle, so little vain was 
he, had failed as yet to understand it, that he had 
returned to a changed position, that he was no longer 
lonely and neglected, but had taken his natural place 
among the great writers of his day. He sent bright 
accounts of himself to Scotsbrig. ' I find John Ster- 
ling here,- and many friends, all kinder each than the 
other to me. With talk and locomotion the days p? , 
cheerfully till I rest and gird myself together again. 
They make a great talk about the book, whfc^a seerus 
to have succeeded in a far higher degree than I looked 

79 



/ 



8o FAMOUS SCOTS 

for. Everybody is astonished at every other body's 
being pleased with this wonderful performance.' * 

Carlyle did nothing all the winter except to write 
his essay on Sir Walter Scott. His next task was to 
prepare for a second course of lectures in the spring 
on ' Heroes.' The course ended with c a blaze of fire- 
works — people weeping at the passionately earnest tone 
in which for once they heard themselves addressed.' 
The effort brought Carlyle ^300 after all expenses 
had been paid. 'A great blessing,' he remarked, ' to 
a man that had been haunted by the squalid spectre 
of beggary.' 

Carlyle had no intention of visiting Scotland that 
autumn, but having received a pressing invitation from 
old friends at Kirkcaldy, he took steamer to Leith in 
August. While at Kirkcaldy he crossed to Edinburgh 
and called on Jeffrey. ' He sat,' says Carlyle, ' waiting 
for me at Moray Place. We talked long in the style 
of literary and philosophic clitter-clatter. Finally it 
was settled that I should go out to dinner with him 
at Craigcrook, and not return to Fife till the morrow.' 
They dined and abstained from contradicting each 
other, Carlyle admitting that Jeffrey was becoming an 
pliable old fribble, ' very cheerful, very heartless, very 
')le ,ettable and tolerable.' 

On his return to London, equal to work again, 
Carlyle^'- ^nd all well. He was gratified to hear that 
* rVoude's ' Life in London,' vol. i. p. 115. 



THOMAS CARLYLE 81 

the eighth edition of the French Revolution was almost 
sold, and that another would be called for, while there 
were numerous applications from review editors for 
articles if he would please to supply them. Mill about 
this time asked him to contribute a paper on Cromwell 
to the London and Westminster Review. Carlyle agreed, 
and was preparing to begin when the negotiations were 
broken off. Mill had gone abroad, leaving a Mr 
Robertson to manage the Review. Robertson coolly 
wrote to say that he need not go on with the article, 
1 for he meant to do Cromwell himself.' Carlyle was 
wroth, and that incident determined him to 'throw 
himself seriously into the history of the Commonwealth, 
and to expose himself no more to cavalier treatment from 
" able editors." ' But for that task he required books. 
Then it was that the idea of founding a London library 
occurred to him. Men of position took up the matter 
warmly, and Carlyle's object was accomplished. ' Let 
the tens of thousands,' says Mr Froude, ' who, it is to 
be hoped, " are made better and wiser " by the books 
collected there, remember that they owe the privilege 
entirely to Carlyle.' 

One of Carlyle's new acquaintances was Monckton 
Milnes, who asked him to breakfast. Carlyle used to 
say that if Christ were again on earth Milnes would 
ask Him to breakfast, and the clubs would all be talk- 
ing of the • good things ' that Christ had said. He also 
became familiar with Mr Baring, afterwards Lord Ash- 
i F 



82 FAMOUS SCOTS 

burton, and his accomplished wife, who in course of 
time exercised a disturbing influence over the Carlyle 
household. It would not tend to edification to dwell 
upon the domestic misunderstandings at Cheyne Row ; 
besides, are not they to be found detailed at great 
length in Froude's Life, the Reminiscences, and Letters 
and Memorials ? Although Carlyle was taking life 
somewhat easy, he was making preparations for his third 
course of lectures, his subject being the ' Revolutions 
of Modern Europe.' They did not please the lecturer, 
but the audiences were as enthusiastic as ever, and he 
made a clear gain of ^£"200. 

About this time Emerson was pressing him to go 
to Boston on a lecturing tour. But Carlyle thought 
better of it. More important work awaited him in 
London. 'All his life,' says Froude, ' he had been 
meditating on the problem of the working-man's exist- 
ence in this country at the present epoch 

He had seen the Glasgow riots in 1819. He had 
heard his father talk of the poor masons, dining silently 
upon water and water-cresses. His letters are full of 
reflections on such things, sad or indignant, as the 
humour might be. He was himself a working-man's 
son. He had been bred in a peasant home, and all 
his sympathies were with his own class. He was not 
a revolutionist ; he knew well that violence would be 
no remedy; that there lay only madness and deeper 
misery. But the fact remained, portending frightful 



THOMAS CARLYI.E 83 

issues. The Reform Bill was to have mended matters 
but the Reform Bill had gone by and the poor were 
none the happier. The power of the State had been 
shifted from the aristocracy to the mill-owners, and 
merchants, and shopkeepers. That was all. The 
handicraftsman remained where he was, or was sink- 
ing, rather, into an unowned Arab, to whom " freedom " 
meant freedom to work if the employer had work to 
offer him conveniently to himself, or else freedom to 
starve. The fruit of such a state of society as this was 
the Sansculottism on which he had been lecturing, and 
he felt that he must put his thoughts upon it in a per- 
manent form. He had no faith in political remedies, 
in extended suffrages, recognition of "the rights of 
man," etc. — absolutely none. That was the road on 
which the French had gone ; and, if tried in England, 
it would end as it ended with them — in anarchy, and 
hunger, and fury. The root of the mischief was the 
forgetfulness on the part of the upper classes, increas- 
ing now to flat denial, that they owed any duty to 
those under them beyond the payment of contract 
wages at the market price. The Liberal theory, as 
formulated in Political Economy, was that every one 
should attend exclusively to his own interests, and that 
the best of all possible worlds would be the certain 
result. His own conviction was that the result would 
be the worst of all possible worlds, a world in which 



84 FAMOUS SCOTS 

human life, such a life as human beings ought to live, 
would become impossible.' * 

He wrote to his brother when his lectures were over: 
'Guess what immediate project I am on; that of 
writing an article on the working-classes for the 
"Quarterly." It is verily so. I offered to do the 
thing for Mill about a year ago. He durst not. I felt 
a kind of call and monition of duty to do it, wrote 
to Lockhart accordingly, was altogether invitingly 
answered, had a long interview with the man yesterday, 
found him a person of sense, good-breeding, even kind- 
ness, and great consentaneity of opinion with myself on 
the matter. Am to get books from him to-morrow, 
and so shall forthwith set about telling the Conserva- 
tives a thing or two about the claims, condition, rights, 
and mights of the working order of men.' 

When the annual exodus from London came, the 
Carlyles went north for a holiday. They returned 
much refreshed at the end of two months. His pre- 
sence, moreover, was required in London, as WiUielm 
Meister was now to be republished. He set about 
finishing his article for the " Quarterly," but as he pro- 
gressed he felt some misgiving as to its ever appearing 
in that magazine. ' I have finished,' he wrote on 
November 8, 1839, 'a long review article, thick 
pamphlet, or little volume, entitled " Chartism." Lock- 
hart has it, for it was partly promised to him ; at least 
* Froude's * Life in London,' vol. i. pp. 161-62. 



THOMAS CARLYLE 85 

the refusal of it was, and that, I conjecture, will be all 
he will enjoy of it.' Lockhart sent it back, ' seemingly 
not without reluctance,' saying he dared not. Mill was 
shown the pamphlet and was ■ unexpectedly delighted 
with it.' He was willing to publish it, but Carlyle's 
wife and brother insisted that the thing was too good 
for a magazine article. Fraser undertook to print it, 
and before the close of the year Chartism was in the 
hands of the public. 

The sale was rapid, an edition of a thousand copies 

being sold immediately. ' Chartism,' Froude narrates, 

was loudly noticed : " considerable reviewing, but 

very daft reviewing." Men wondered; how could 

they choose but wonder, when a writer of evident 

power stripped bare the social disease, told them that 

their remedies were quack remedies, and their progress 

was progress to dissolution? The Liberal journals, 

finding their " formulas " disbelieved in, clamoured that 

Carlyle was unorthodox; no Radical, but a wolf in 

sheep's clothing. Yet what he said was true, and 

could not be denied to be true. "They approve 

generally," he said, " but regret very much that I am a 

Tory. Stranger Tory, in my opinion, has not been 

fallen in with in these later generations." Again a few 

weeks later (February n) : " The people are beginning 

to discover that I am not a Tory. Ah, no ! but one 

of the deepest, though perhaps the quietest, of all the 

Radicals now extant in the world — a thing productive 



86 FAMOUS SCOTS 

of small comfort to several persons. They have said, 
and they will say, and let them say." 

His final course of lectures now confronted him, 
and these he entitled Heroes and Hero Worship. He 
tells his mother (May 26, 1840): 'The lecturing busi- 
ness went off with sufficient eclat. The course was 
generally judged, and I rather join therein myself, to 
be the bad best I have yet given. On the last day — 
Friday last — I went to speak of Cromwell with a head 
full of air ; you know that wretched physical feeling ; I 
had been concerned with drugs, had awakened at five, 
etc. It is absolute martyrdom. My tongue would 
hardly wag at all when I got done. Yet the good 
people sate breathless, or broke out into all kinds of 
testimonies of goodwill. ... In a word, we got right 
handsomely through.' That was Carlyle's last appear- 
ance as a public lecturer. He was now the observed 
of all observers in London society ; but he was weary 
of lionising and junketings. ' What,' he notes in his 
journal on June 15, 1840, 'are lords coming to call on 
one and fill one's head with whims ? They ask you to 
go among champagne, bright glitter, semi-poisonous 
excitements which you do not like even for the moment, 
and you are sick for a week after. As old Tom White 
said of whisky, " Keep it — Deevil a ever I'se better 
than when there's no a drop on't i' my weam." So say 
I of dinner popularity, lords and lionism — Keep it; 
give it to those that like it.' 



THOMAS CARLYLE 87 

Carlyle was much refreshed at this period by visits 
from Tennyson. Here is what he says of the poet : 
' A fine, large-featured, dim-eyed, bronze-coloured, 
shaggy-headed man is Alfred ; dusty, smoky, free and 
easy, who swims outwardly and inwardly with great 
composure in an inarticulate element of tranquil chaos 
and tobacco smoke. Great now and then when he does 
emerge — a most restful, brotherly, solid-hearted man." 

In a note to his brother John on September n, 
1840, he says: 'I have again some notions towards 
writing a book — let us see what comes of that. It is 
the one use of living, for me. Enough to-day.' The 
book he had in view was Cromwell. Journalising on 
the day after Christmas he laments — ' Oliver Cromwell 
will not prosper with me at all. I began reading about 
that subject some four months ago. I learn almost 
nothing by reading, yet cannot as yet heartily begin to 
write. Nothing on paper yet. I know not where to 
begin.' 

At the end of the year Mrs Carlyle wrote : ' Carlyle 
is reading voraciously, preparatory to writing a new 
book. For the rest, he growls away much in the old 
style. But one gets to feel a certain indifference to his 
growling ; if one did not, it would be the worse for 
one.' A month or two later, Carlyle writes : ' Think 
not hardly of me, dear Jeannie. In the mutual misery 
we often are in, we do not know how dear we are to 
one another. By the help of Heaven, I shall get a little 



88 FAMOUS SCOTS 

better, and somewhat of it shall abate. Last night, at 
dinner, Richard Milnes made them all laugh with a 
saying of yours. " When the wife has influenza, it is a 
slight cold — when the man has it, it is, &c, &c."' Writing 
to Sterling he exclaims, ' I shall verily fly to Craigen- 
puttock again before long. Yet I know what solitude 
is, and imprisonment among black cattle and peat 
bogs. The truth is, we are never right as we are. 
" Oh, the devil burn it " ! said the Irish drummer 
flogging his countryman ; " there's no pleasing of you, 
strike where one will." ' 

Milnes prevailed on Carlyle, instead of flying to the 
bleak expanse of Craigenputtock, to accompany him to 
his father's house at Fryston, in Yorkshire, whence 
he sent a series of affectionate and graphic letters to 
Mrs Carlyle. Being so far north, he took a run to 
Dumfriesshire to see his mother, who had been slightly 
ailing. He was back in London, however, in May, 
but not improved in mind or body. It was a hot 
summer, and the Carlyles went to Scotsbrig, and took 
a cottage at Newby, close to Annan. By the end of 
September, Carlyle was back in Cheyne Row. His 
latest hero still troubled him. ' Ought I,' he asks, ' to 
write now of Oliver Cromwell ? . . . I cannot yet see 
clearly.' 

Carlyle at one time had a hankering after a Scottish 
professorship, but the ' door had been shut in his face,' 
sometimes contemptuously. He was now famous, and 



THOMAS CARLYLE 89 

the young Edinburgh students, having looked into his 
lectures on Heroes, began to think that, whatever 
might be the opinions of the authorities and patrons, 
they for their part must consider lectures such as these 
a good exchange for what was provided for them. A 
' History Chair ' was about to be established. A party 
of them, represented by a Mr Dunipace, presented a 
requisition to the Faculty of Advocates to appoint 
Carlyle. When asked his consent to be nominated, 
Carlyle replied : ' Accept my kind thanks, you and all 
your associates, for your zeal to serve me. . . . Ten 
years ago such an invitation might perhaps have been 
decisive of much for me, but it is too late now ; too 
late for many reasons, which I need not trouble you 
with at present.' 

A very severe blow now fell upon Mrs Carlyle, who 
received news from Templand that her mother had 
been struck by apoplexy, and was dangerously ill. 
Although unfit for travelling, she caught the first train 
from Euston Square to Liverpool, but at her uncle's 
house there she learnt that all was over. Mrs Carlyle 
lay ill in Liverpool, unable to stir. After a while she 
was able to go back to London, where Carlyle joined 
her in the month of May. It was on his return journey 
that he paid a visit to Dr Arnold at Rugby, when he 
had an opportunity, under his host's genial guidance, 
to explore the field of Naseby. 

His sad occupations in Scotland, and the sad thoughts 



9© FAMOUS SCOTS 

they suggested, made Carlyle disinclined for society. 
He had a room arranged for him at the top of his 
house, and there he sate and smoked, and read books 
on Cromwell, ' the sight of Naseby having brought the 
subject back out of " the abysses." ' Meanwhile he 
had a pleasant trip to Ostend with Mr Stephen Spring 
Rice, Commissioner of Customs, of which he wrote 
vivid descriptions. 

On October 25, 1842, Carlyle wrote in his journal : 
' For many months there has been no writing here. 
Alas ! what was there to write ? About myself, nothing ; 
or less, if that was possible. I have not got one word 
to stand upon paper in regard to Oliver. The begin- 
nings of work are even more formidable than the 
executing of it.' But another subject was to engross 
his attention for a little while. The distress of the 
poor became intense ; less in London, however, than 
in other large towns. ' I declare,' he wrote to his mother 
early in January 1843, 'I declare I begin to feel as if 
I should not hold my peace any longer, as if I should 
perhaps open my mouth in a way that some of them 
are not expecting — we shall see if this book were 
done.' On the 20th he wrote : ' I hope it will be 
a rather useful kind of book.' He could not go on 
with Cromwell till he had unburdened his soul. ' The 
look of the world,' he said, ■ is really quite oppressive 
to me. Eleven thousand souls in Paisley alone living 
on threehalfpence a day, and the governors of the land 



THOMAS CARLYLE 91 

all busy shooting partridges and passing corn-laws the 
while ! It is a thing no man with a speaking tongue 
in his head is entitled to be silent about.' The out- 
come of all his soul-burnings and cogitations was Past 
and Present, which appeared at the beginning of April. 
The reviewers set to work, ' wondering, admiring, 
blaming, chiefly the last.' 

Carlyle then undertook several journeys, chiefly in 
order to visit Cromwellian battlefields, the sight of which 
made the Oliver enterprise no longer impossible. He 
found a renovated house on his return, and Mrs Carlyle 
writing on November 28th, describes him as ( over head 
and ears in Cromwell,' and ' lost to humanity for the 
time being.' Six months later, he makes this admission 
in his journal — ' My progress in " Cromwell " is fright- 
ful. I am no day absolutely idle, but the confusions 
that lie in my way require far more fire of energy than 
I can muster on most days, and I sit not so much work- 
ing as painfully looking on work.' Four months later, 
when Cromwell was progressing slowly, Carlyle suffered 
a severe personal loss by the death of John Sterling. 
' Sterling,' says Froude, ' had been his spiritual pupil, 
his first, and also his noblest and best. Consumption 
had set its fatal mark upon him.' Carlyle drowned 
his sorrow in hard work, and in July 1845 tne en ^ of 
Cromwell was coming definitely in sight. In his journal 
under date August 26th, is to be found this entry : ' I 
have this moment ended Oliver ; hang it ! He is ended, 



92 FAMOUS SCOTS 

thrums and all. I have nothing more to write on the 
subject, only mountains of wreck to burn. Not (any 
more) up to the chin in paper clippings and chaotic 
litter, hatefuller to me than most. I am to have a swept 
floor now again.' And thus the herculean labours of 
five years were ended. His desire was to be in Scot- 
land, and he made his way northwards by the usual 
sea route to Annan and Scotsbrig. He did not remain 
long away, and upon his return Cromwell was just 
issuing from the press. It was received with great 
favour, the sale was rapid, and additional materials 
came from unexpected quarters. In February 1846 a 
new edition was needed in order to insert fresh letters 
of Oliver according to date; a process, Carlyle said 
1 requiring one's most excellent talent, as of shoe- 
cobbling, really that kind of talent carried to a high 
pitch.' When completed, Carlyle presented a copy of 
it to the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, a step he 
never took before or after with any of his writings, — a 
compliment which Peel gracefully acknowledged. 

Carlyle's plans for the summer of 1846 were, a visit 
to his mother and a run across to Ireland. Charles 
Gavan Duffy of the Nation newspaper saw him in 
London in consequence of what he had written in 
Chartism about misgovernment in Ireland. He had 
promised to go over and see what the ' Young Ireland ' 
movement was doing. On the 31st of August he left 
Scotsbrig, and landed in due course at Belfast, where 



THOMAS CARLYLE 93 

he was to have been met by John Mitchel and Gavan 
Duffy and driven to Drogheda. He missed his two 
friends through a mistake at the post-office, and hurried 
on by railway to Dublin. He met them at Dundrum, 
and was there entertained at a large dinner-party. 
Next day he dined at Mitchel's. His stay was remark- 
ably short. He took steamer at Kingstown, and in the 
early morning of September 1 oth ' he was sitting smok- 
ing a cigar before the door of his wife's uncle's house 
in Liverpool till the household should awake and let 
him in.' 

In June 1847 Carlyle relates that they had a flying 
visit from Jeffrey. 'A much more interesting visitor 
than Jeffrey was old Dr Chalmers, who came down to 
us also last week, whom I had not seen before for, I 
think, five-and-twenty years. It was a pathetic meet- 
ing. The good old man is grown white-headed, but is 
otherwise wonderfully little altered — grave, deliberate, 
very gentle in his deportment, but with plenty too of 
soft energy ; full of interest still for all serious things, 
full of real kindliness, and sensible even to honest mirth 
in a fair measure. He sate with us an hour and a 
half, went away with our blessings and affections. It is 
long since I have spoken to so good and really pious- 
hearted and beautiful old man.' In a week or two 
Chalmers was suddenly called away. ' I believe,' wrote 
Carlyle to his mother, ' there is not in all Scotland, or 
all Europe, any such Christian priest left. It will long 
be memorable to us, the little visit we had from him.' 



94 FAMOUS SCOTS 

Early in 1848, the Jew Bill was before Parliament, 
and the fate of it doubtful, narrates Mr Froude. Baron 
Rothschild wrote to ask Carlyle to write a pamphlet in 
its favour, and intimated that he might name any sum 
which he liked to ask as payment. Froude enquired 
how he answered. ' Well,' he said, ' I had to tell him 
it couldn't be ; but I observed, too, that I could not 
conceive why he and his friends, who were supposed 
to be looking out for the coming of Shiloh, should be 
seeking seats in a Gentile legislature.' Froude asked 
what the Baron said to that. ' Why,' said Carlyle, ' he 
seemed to think the coming of Shiloh was a dubious 
business, and that meanwhile, etc., etc' 

On February 9, 1848, Carlyle wrote in his journal : 
'Chapman's money [Chapman & Hall were his pub- 
lishers] all paid, lodged now in the Dumfries Bank. 
New edition of "Sartor" to be wanted soon. My poor 
books of late have yielded me a certain fluctuating 
annual income; at all events, I am quite at my ease 
as to money, and that on such low terms. I often 
wonder at the luxurious ways of the age. Some 
^1500, I think, is what has accumulated in the bank. 
Of fixed income (from Craigenputtock) ^150 a year. 
Perhaps as much from my books may lie fixed amid 
the huge fluctuation (last year, for instance, it was 
^800: the year before, ^100; the year before that, 
about ^700; this year, again, it is like to be ^100; 
the next perhaps nothing — very fluctuating indeed) — 



THOMAS CARLYLE 9 5 

some ^300 in all, and that amply suffices me. For 
my wife is the best of housewives ; noble, too, in refer- 
ence to the property, which is hers, which she has never 
once in the most distant way seemed to know to be 
hers. Be this noted and remembered ; my thrifty little 
lady — every inch a lady — ah me ! In short, I auth- 
entically feel indifferent to money ; would not go this 
way or that to gain more money.' * 

The Revolution of February 24th at Paris surprised 
Carlyle less than most of his contemporaries, as it con- 
firmed what he had been saying for years. He did 
not believe, we are told, in immediate convulsion in 
Englaad ; but he did believe that, unless England took 
warning and mended her ways, her turn would come. 
The excitement in London was intense, and leading 
men expressed themselves freely, but Carlyle's general 
thoughts were uttered in a lengthy letter to Thomas 
Erskine of Linlathen, for whom he entertained a warm 
regard. On March 14 he met Macaulay at Lord 
Mahon's at breakfast ; ' Niagara of eloquent common- 
place talk,' he says, 'from Macaulay. "Very good- 
natured man"; man cased in official mail of proof; 
stood my impatient fire-explosions with much patience, 
merely hissing a little steam up, and continued his 
Niagara — supply and demand ; power ruinous to power- 
ful himself; ////possibility of Government doing more 
than keep the peace ; suicidal distraction of new French 
* Froude's ' Life in London,' vol. i. p. 420. 



96 FAMOUS SCOTS 

Republic, etc. Essentially irremediable, commonplace 
nature of the man ; all that was in him now gone to 
the tongue ; a squat, thickset, low-browed, short, grizzled 
little man of fifty.' 

One of the few men Carlyle was anxious to see 
was Sir Robert Peel. He was introduced by the 
Barings at a dinner at Bath House. Carlyle sat next 
to Peel, whom he describes as ' a finely-made man of 
strong, not heavy, rather of elegant, stature ; stands 
straight, head slightly thrown back, and eyelids mod- 
estly drooping ; every way mild and gentle, yet with 
less of that fixed smile than the portraits give him. 
He is towards sixty, and, though not broken at all, 
carries, especially in his complexion, when you are 
near him, marks of that age; clear, strong blue eyes 
which kindle on occasion, voice extremely good, low- 
toned, something of cooing in it, rustic, affectionate, 
honest, mildly persuasive. Spoke about French Re- 
volutions new and old ; well read in all that ; had seen 
General Dumouriez; reserved seemingly by nature, 
obtrudes nothing of diplomatic reserve. On the con- 
trary, a vein of mild fun in him, real sensibility to the 

ludicrous, which feature I liked best of all I 

consider him by far our first public man — which, in- 
deed, is saying little — and hope that England in these 
frightful times may still get some good of him. N.B. — 
This night with Peel was the night in which Berlin city 
executed its last terrible battle, (19th of March to 



THOMAS CARLYLE 97 

Sunday morning the 20th, five o'clock.) While we sate 
there the streets of Berlin city were all blazing with grape- 
shot and the war of enraged men. What is to become 
of all that ? I have a book to write about it. Alas ! " 
We hear of a great Chartist petition to be presented 
by 200,000 men. People here keep up their foolish 
levity in speaking of these things ; but considerate 
persons find them to be very grave; and indeed all, 
even the laughers, are in considerable secret alarm.' * 

At such a time Carlyle knew that he, the author of 
Chartism, ought to say something. Foolish people, 
too, came pressing for his opinions. Not seeing his 
way to a book upon ' Democracy,' he wrote a good 
many newspaper articles, chiefly in the Examiner and 
the Spectator, to deliver his soul. Even Fonblanque 
and Rintoul (the editors), remarks Froude, friendly 
though they were to him, could not allow him his full 
swing. ' There is no established journal,' complained 
Carlyle, ' that can stand my articles, no single one they 
would not blow the bottom out of.' 

On July 1 2 occurs this entry in his journal : ' Chart- 
ist concern, and Irish Repeal concern, and French 
Republic concern have all gone a bad way since the 
March entry — April 20 (immortal day already dead), 
day of Chartist monster petition ; 200,000 special 
constables swore themselves in, etc., and Chartism 
came to nothing. Riots since, but the leaders all 
* Froude's ' Life in London,' vol. i. pp. 433-4. 
I G 



98 FAMOUS SCOTS 

lodged in gaol, tried, imprisoned for two years, etc., 
and so ends Chartism for the present. Irish Mitchel, 
poor fellow ! is now in Bermuda as a felon ; letter from 
him, letter to him, letter to and from Lord Clarendon 
— was really sorry for poor Mitchel. But what help ? 
French Republic cannonaded by General Cavaignac ; a 
sad outlook there.' * 

Carlyle's Cromwell had created a set of enthusiastic 
admirers who were bent on having a statue of the 
great Protector set up. Carlyle was asked to give his 
sanction to the proposal. Writing to his mother, he 
said: 'The people having subscribed ,£25,000 for a 
memorial to an ugly bullock of a Hudson, who did not 
even pretend to have any merit except that of being 
suddenly rich, and who is now discovered to be little 
other than at heart a horse-coper and dishonest fellow, 
I think they ought to leave Cromwell alone of their 
memorials, and try to honour him in some more profit- 
able way — by learning to be honest men like him, for 
example. But we shall see what comes of all this 
Cromwell work — a thing not without value either.' f 

' Ireland,' says Froude, ' of all the topics on which 
Carlyle had meditated writing, remained painfully fas- 
cinating. He had looked at the beggarly scene, he 
had seen the blighted fields, the ragged misery of the 
wretched race who were suffering for other's sins as 

* Fronde's ' Life in London,' vol. i. p. 441. 
+ Ibid., vol. i. p. 451. 



THOMAS CARLYLE 99 

well as for their own. Since that brief visit of his, the 
famine had been followed by the famine-fever, and the 
flight of millions from a land which was smitten with a 
curse. Those ardent young men with whom he had 
dined at Dundrum were working as felons in the docks 
at Bermuda. Gavan Duffy, after a near escape from 
the same fate, had been a guest in Cheyne Row ; and 
the story which he had to tell of cabins torn down by 
crowbars, and shivering families, turned out of their 
miserable homes, dying in the ditches by the roadside, 
had touched Carlyle to the very heart. He was furious 
at the economical commonplaces with which England 
was consoling itself. He regarded Ireland as "the break- 
ing-point of the huge suppuration which all British and 
all European society then was.' " * Carlyle paid a second 
visit to Ireland. He was anxious to write a book on 
the subject. He noted down what he had seen, and 
1 then dismissed the unhappy subject from his mind,' 
giving his manuscript to a friend, which was published 
after his death. 

The 7th of August found Carlyle among his ' ain 
folk ' at Scotsbrig, and this was his soliloquy : ' Thank 
Heaven for the sight of real human industry, with 
human fruits from it, once more. The sight of fenced 
fields, weeded crops, and human creatures with whole 
clothes on their back — it was as if one had got into 
spring water out of dunghill puddles.' Mrs Carlyle 
* Froude's ' Life in London,' vol. i. p. 456. 



ioo FAMOUS SCOTS 

had also gone to Scotland, and ' wandered like a 
returned spirit about the home of her childhood.' Of 
her numerous lively letters, room must be found for 
a characteristic epistle to her brother-in-law, John 
Carlyle. His translation of Dante's Inferno was just 
out, and her uncle's family at Auchtertool Manse, in 
Fife, where she was staying, were busy reading and 
discussing it. ' We had been talking about you,' 
she says, ' and had sunk silent. Suddenly my uncle 
turned his head to me and said, shaking it gravely, 
" He has made an awesome plooster o' that place." 
" Who ? What place, uncle ? " " Whew ! the place 
ye'll maybe gang to, if ye dinna tak' care." I really 
believe he considers all those circles of your invention. 
Walter [a cousin, just ordained] performed the marriage 
service over a couple of colliers the day after I came. 
I happened to be in his study when they came in, and 
asked leave to remain. The man was a good-looking 
man enough, dreadfully agitated, partly with the busi- 
ness he was come on, partly with drink. He had 
evidently taken a glass too much to keep his heart up. 
The girl had one very large inflamed eye and one 
little one, which looked perfectly composed, while the 
large eye stared wildly, and had a tear in it. Waltei 
married them very well indeed ; and his affecting words, 
together with the bridegroom's pale, excited face, and 
the bride's ugliness, and the poverty, penury, and want 
imprinted on the whole business, and above all fellow- 



THOMAS CARLYLE 101 

feeling with the poor wretches then rushing on their 
fate — all that so overcame me that I fell crying as 
desperately as if I had been getting married to the 
collier myself, and, when the ceremony was over, ex- 
tended my hand to the unfortunates, and actually (in 
such an enthusiasm of pity did I find myself) I pre- 
sented the new husband with a snuff-box which I 
happened to have in my hand, being just about pre- 
senting it to Walter when the creatures came in. This 
unexpected Himmehendiing finished turning the man's 
head ; he wrung my hand over and over, leaving his 
mark for some hours after, and ended his grateful 
speeches with, " Oh, Miss ! Oh, Liddy ! may ye 
hae mair comfort and pleasure in your life than ever 
you have had yet ! " which might easily be.' 

Carlyle was full of wrath at what he considered 
the cant about the condition of the wage-earners 
in Manchester and elsewhere, and his indignation 
found vent in the Latter-day Pamphlets. Froude 
once asked him if he had ever thought of going 
into Parliament, for the former knew that the oppor- 
tunity must have been offered him. ' Well,' he said, 
1 1 did think of it at the time of the " Latter-day 
Pamphlets." I felt that nothing could prevent me from 
getting up in the House and saying all that.' ' He 
was powerful,' adds Froude, ' but he was not powerful 
enough to have discharged with his single voice the 
vast volume of conventional electricity with which the 



io2 FAMOUS SCOTS 

collective wisdom of the nation was, and remains 
charged. It is better that his thoughts should have 
been committed to enduring print, where they remain 
to be reviewed hereafter by the light of fact.' * 

The printing of the Pamphlets commenced at the 
beginning of 1850, and went on month after month, 
each separately published, no magazine daring to 
become responsible for them. When the Pamphlets 
appeared, they were received with 'astonished indig- 
nation.' ' Carlyle taken to whisky,' was the popular 
impression — or perhaps he had gone mad. ' Punch, 1 
says Froude, ' the most friendly to him of all the 
London periodicals, protested affectionately. The 
delinquent was brought up for trial before him, I think 
for injuring his reputation. He was admonished, but 
stood impenitent, and even " called the worthy magis- 
trate a windbag and a sham." I suppose it was 
Thackeray who wrote this ; or some other kind 
friend, who feared, like Emerson, " that the world 
would turn its back on him." He was under no illusion 
himself as to the effect which he was producing.' -\ 

Amid the general storm, Carlyle was ' agreeably 
surprised ' to receive an invitation to dine with Peel 
at Whitehall Gardens, where he met a select company. 
' After all the servants but the butler were gone,' 
narrates Carlyle, ' we began to hear a little of Peel's 

* Froude's ' Life in London,' vol. ii. p. 26. 
t Ibid., vol. ii. p. 36. 



THOMAS CARLYLE 103 

quiet talk across the table, unimportant, distinguished 
by its sense of the ludicrous shining through a strong 
official rationality and even seriousness of temper. 
Distracted address of a letter from somebody to Queen 
Victoria ; " The most noble George Victoria, Queen of 
England, Knight and Baronet," or something like that. 
A man had once written to Peel himself, while 
secretary, "that he was weary of life, that if any 
gentleman wanted for his park-woods a hermit, he, 
etc.", all of which was very pretty and human as Peel 
gave it us.' * Carlyle was driven home by the Bishop 
of Oxford, 'Soapy Sam' Wilberforce, whom he had 
probably met before at the Ashburton's. The Bishop 
once told Froude that he considered Carlyle a most 
eminently religious man. ' Ah, Sam,' said Carlyle to 
Froude one day, ' he is a very clever fellow ; I do not 
hate him near as much as I fear I ought to do.' 
Carlyle and Peel met once more, at Bath House, 
and there, too, he was first introduced to the Duke of 
Wellington. Writing at the time, Carlyle said : ' I 
had never seen till now how beautiful, and what an 
expression of graceful simplicity, veracity, and noble- 
ness there is about the old hero when you see him close 
at hand. . . . Except for Dr Chalmers, I have not for 
many years seen so beautiful an old man.' 

Carlyle intended, some time or other, writing a 
' Life of Sterling,' but meanwhile he accepted an invi- 
* Froude's • Life in London,' vol. ii. p. 43. 



104 FAMOUS SCOTS 

tation to visit South Wales. Thence he made his way 
to Scotsbrig. On the 27th September 1850, he ' parted 
sorrowfully with his mother.' When he reached London, 
the autumn quarterlies were reviewing the Pamphlets, 
and the ' shrieking tone was considerably modified.' 
• A review of them,' says Froude, ' by Masson in the 
North British distinctly pleased Carlyle. A review in 
the Dublin he found "excellently serious," and con- 
jectured that it came from some Anglican pervert or 
convert. It was written, I believe, by Dr Ward.' 

After a few more wanderings, Carlyle set about the 
Life of Sterling, and on April 5, 1851, he informs his 
mother : ' I told the Doctor about " John Sterling's 
Life," a small, insignificant book or pamphlet I have 
been writing. The booksellers got it away from me the 
other morning, to see how much there is of it, in the 
first place. I know not altogether myself whether it is 
worth printing or not, but rather think it will be the end 
of it whether or not. It has cost little trouble, and need 
not do much ill, if it do no great amount of good.' 
Another visit had to be paid to Scotsbrig, where he 
read the " Life of Chalmers." ' An excellent Christian 
man,' he said. 'About as great a contrast to himself 
in all ways as could be found in these epochs under 
the same sky.' 

When he got back to Cheyne Row, he took to read- 
ing the "Seven Years' War," with a view to another 
book. He determined to go to Germany, and on August 



THOMAS CARLYLE 105 

30, 1852, Carlyle embarked 'on board the greasy little 
wretch of a Leith steamer, laden to the water's edge 
with pig-iron and herrings.' The journey over, he set 
to work on { Frederick,' but was driven almost to 
despair by the cock-crowing in his neighbourhood. 
Writing to Mrs Carlyle, he says : ' I foresee in general 
these cocks will require to be abolished, entirely 
silenced, whether we build the new room or not. I 
would cheerfully shoot them, and pay the price if 
discovered, but I have no gun, should be unsafe 
for hitting, and indeed seldom see the wretched 
animals.' 

He took refuge at the Ashburton's house, the 
Grange, but on the 20th of December, news came 
that his mother was seriously ill, and could not last 
long. He hurried off to Scotsbrig, and reached there 
in time to see her once more alive. In his journal, 
this passage is to be found under date January 
8, 1854: 'The stroke has fallen. My dear old 
mother is gone from me, and in the winter of the 
year, confusedly under darkness of weather and of 
mind, the stern final epoch — epoch of old age — is 

beginning to unfold itself for me It is 

matter of perennial thankfulness to me, and beyond 
my desert in that matter very far, that I found my dear 
old mother still alive ; able to recognise me with a 
faint joy ; her former self still strangely visible there in 
all its lineaments, though worn to the uttermost thread. 



106 FAMOUS SCOTS 

The brave old mother and the good, whom to lose had 
been my fear ever since intelligence awoke in me in 

this world, arrived now at the final bourn She 

was about 84 years of age, and could not with advan- 
tage to any side remain with us longer. Surely it was 
a good Power that gave us such a mother ; and good 
though stern that took her away from amid such grief 
and labour by a death beautiful to one's thoughts. 
" All the days of my appointed time will I wait till my 
change come." This they heard her muttering, and 
many other less frequent pious texts and passages. 
Amen, Amen! Sunday, December 25, 1853 — a day 

henceforth for ever memorable to me To live for 

the shorter or longer remainder of my days with the 
simple bravery, veracity, and piety of her that is gone : 
that would be a right learning from her death, and a 
right honouring of her memory. But alas all is yet 
frozen within me ; even as it is without me at present, 
and I have made little or no way. God be helpful to 
me ! I myself am very weak, confused, fatigued, 
entangled in poor ivorldlinesses too. Newspaper para- 
graphs, even as this sacred and peculiar thing, are not 
indifferent to me. Weak soul ! and I am fifty-eight 
years old, and the tasks I have on hand, Frederick, 
&c, are most ungainly, incongruous with my mood — 
and the night cometh, for me too is not distant, which 
for her is come. I must try, I must try. Poor brother 
Jack ! Will he do his Dante now ? For him also I am 



THOMAS CARLYLE 107 

sad ; and surely he has deserved gratitude in these last 
years from us all.' * 

When he returned to London, Carlyle lived in strict 
seclusion, making repeated efforts at work on what he 
called 'the unexecutable book,' Frederick. In the 
spring of 1854, tidings reached Carlyle of the death of 
Professor Wilson. Between them there had never 
been any cordial relation, says Froude. ' They had 
met in Edinburgh in the old days ; on Carlyle's part 
there had been no backwardness, and Wilson was not 
unconscious of Carlyle's extraordinary powers. But he 
had been shy of Carlyle, and Carlyle had resented it, 
and now this April the news came that Wilson was 
gone, and Carlyle had to write his epitaph. ' I knew 
his figure well,' wrote Carlyle in his journal on April 
29 ; 'remember well first seeing him in Princes Street 
on a bright April afternoon — probably 1 8 1 4 — exactly 
forty years ago. ... A tall ruddy figure, with plenteous 
blonde hair, with bright blue eyes, fixed, as if in haste 
towards some distant object, strode rapidly along, 
clearing the press to the left of us, close by the 
railings, near where Blackwood's shop now is. West- 
ward he in haste ; we slowly eastward. Campbell 
whispered me, " That is Wilson of the Isle of Palms" 
which poem I had not read, being then quite mathe- 
matical, scientific, &c, for extraneous reasons, as I now 
see them to have been. The broad-shouldered stately 
* Froude's ' Life in London,' vol. ii. pp. 142-45- 



io8 FAMOUS SCOTS 

bulk of the man struck me ; his flashing eye, copious, 
dishevelled head of hair, and rapid, unconcerned pro- 
gress, like that of a plough through stubble. I really 
liked him, but only from the distance, and thought no 
more of him. It must have been fourteen years later 
before I once saw his figure again, and began to have 
some distant straggling acquaintance of a personal 
kind with him. Glad could I have been to be better 
and more familiarly acquainted ; but though I liked 
much in him, and he somewhat in me, it would not do. 
He was always very kind to me, but seemed to have 
a feeling I should — could — not become wholly his, 
in which he was right, and that on other terms he 
could not have me ; so we let it so remain, and for many 
years — indeed, even after quitting Edinburgh — I had 
no acquaintance with him ; occasionally got symptoms 
of his ill-humour with me — ink-spurts in Blackwood, 
read or heard of, which I, in a surly, silent manner, 

strove to consider flattering rather So far as I 

can recollect, he was once in my house (Comely 
Bank, with a testimonial, poor fellow !), and I once 
in his, De Quincey, &c, a little while one after- 
noon.' * 

On September 16, 1854, Carlyle breaks out in his 

journal : ' " The harvest is past, the summer is ended, 

and we are not saved.'" What a fearful word! I 

cannot find how to take up that miserable " Frederick," 

'^Froude's 'Life in London,' vol. ii. pp. 156-7. 



THOMAS CARLYLE 109 

or what on earth to do with it.' He worked hard at it, 
nevertheless, for eighteen months, and by the end of 
May 1858, the first instalment was all in type. Froude 
remarks that a fine critic once said to him that Carlyle's 
Friedrich Wilhelm was as peculiar and original as 
Sterne's Tristram Shandy ; certainly as distinct a per- 
sonality as exists in English fiction. Carlyle made a 
second journey to Germany. Shortly after his return, 
the already finished volumes of Frederick appeared, and 
they met with an immediate welcome. The success 
was great ; 2000 copies were sold at the first issue, and 
a second 2000 were disposed of almost as rapidly, and 
a third 2000 followed. Mrs Carlyle's health being un- 
satisfactory, Carlyle took a house for the summer at 
Humbie, near Aberdour in Fife. They returned to 
Cheyne Row in October, neither of them benefited by 
their holiday in the north. 

While many of Carlyle's intimate friends were pass- 
ing away, he formed Ruskin's acquaintance, which 
turned out mutually satisfactory. On the 23rd April 
1 86 1, Carlyle writes to his brother John : ' Friday last I 
was persuaded — in fact had unwarily compelled myself, 
as it were — to a lecture of Ruskin's at the Institution, 
Albemarle Street. Lecture on Tree Leaves as physio- 
logical, pictorial, moral, symbolical objects. A crammed 
house, but tolerable to me even in the gallery. The 
lecture was thought to " break down," and indeed it 
quite did " as a lecture''' ; but only did from embarras 



no FAMOUS SCOTS 

des richesses — a rare case. Ruskin did blow asunder 
as by gunpowder explosions his leaf notions, which 
were manifold, curious, genial ; and, in fact, I do not 
recollect to have heard in that place any neatest thing 
I liked so well as this chaotic one.' * 

Frederick was progressing, though slowly, as he 
found the ore in the German material at his disposal 
" nowhere smelted out of it." The third volume was 
finished and published in the summer of 1862 ; the 
fourth volume was getting into type ; and the fifth and 
last was finished in January 1865. 'It nearly killed 
me,' Carlyle writes in his journal, ' it, and my poor 
Jane's dreadful illness, now happily over. No sym- 
pathy could be found on earth for those horrid 
struggles of twelve years, nor happily was any needed. 
On Sunday evening in the end of January (1865) 
I walked out, with the multiplex feeling — joy not 
very prominent in it, but a kind of solemn thankful- 
ness traceable, that I had written the last sentence 
of that unutterable book, and, contrary to many 
forebodings in bad hours, had actually got done with 
it for ever.' 

In England it was at once admitted, says Froude, 
that a splendid addition had been made to the national 
literature. ' The book contained, if nothing else, a 
gallery of historical figures executed with a skill which 
placed Carlyle at the head of literary portrait painters. 
* Froude's ' Life in London,' vol. ii. p. 245. 



THOMAS CARLYLE in 

. . . No critic, after the completion of Frederick, 
challenged Carlyle's right to a place beside the greatest 
of English authors, past or present.' The work was 
translated instantly into German, calling forth the 
warmest appreciation. 



CHAPTER VI 

RECTORIAL ADDRESS DEATH OF MRS CARLYLE 

After a round of holiday visits, including one to 
Annandale, the Carlyles settled down once more at 
Cheyne Row in the summer of 1865. 'The great 
outward event of Carlyle's own life,' observes Froude, 
' Scotland's public recognition of him, was now lying 
close ahead. This his wife was to live to witness as 
her final happiness in this world.' Here is an eloquent 
passage from the same pen : ' I had been at Edin- 
burgh,' writes Froude, ' and had heard Gladstone make 
his great oration on Homer there, on retiring from 
office as Rector. It was a grand display. I never 
recognised before what oratory could do ; the audience 
being kept for three hours in a state of electric tension, 
bursting every moment into applause. Nothing was said 
which seemed of moment when read deliberately after- 
wards ; but the voice was like enchantment, and the 
street, when we left the building, was ringing with a 
prolongation of cheers. Perhaps in all Britain there 
was not a man whose views on all subjects, in heaven 
and earth, less resembled Gladstone's than those of 



THOMAS CARLYLE 113 

the man whom this same applauding multitude elected 
to take his place. The students too, perhaps, were 
ignorant how wide the contradiction was ; but if they 
had been aware of it they need not have acted differ- 
ently. Carlyle had been one of themselves. He had 
risen from among them — not by birth or favour, not on 
the ladder of any established profession, but only by 
the internal force that was in him — to the highest 
place as a modern man of letters. In Frederick he 
had given the finish to his reputation ; he stood now 
at the summit of his fame ; and the Edinburgh students 
desired to mark their admiration in some signal way. 
He had been mentioned before, but he had declined 
to be nominated, for a party only were then in his 
favour. On this occasion, the students were unanimous, 
or nearly so. His own consent was all that was want- 
ing.' * This consent was obtained, and Carlyle was 
chosen Rector of Edinburgh University. But the 
Address troubled him. He resolved, however, as his 
father used to say, to ' gar himself go through with the 
thing,' or at least to try. Froude says he was very 
miserable, but that Mrs Carlyle ' kept up his spirits, 
made fun of his fears, bantered him, encouraged him, 
herself at heart as much alarmed as he was, but con- 
scious, too, of the ridiculous side of it.' She thought 
of accompanying him, but her health would not permit 
of the effort. Both Huxley and Tyndall were going 
* Froude's ' Life in London, 5 vol. ii. p. 295. 
I H 



ii 4 FAMOUS SCOTS 

down, and Tyndall promised Mrs Carlyle to take care 
of her husband. 

On Monday morning, the 29th of March, 1866, 
Carlyle and his wife parted. ' The last I saw of her/ 
he said, ' was as she stood with her back to the parlour 
door to bid me good-bye. She kissed me twice, she 
me once, I her a second time.' They parted for ever. 

Edinburgh was reached in due course, and what 
happened there had best be told by an eye-witness, 
Professor Masson. ' On the night following Carlyle's 
arrival in town,' he says, ' after he had settled himself 
in Mr Erskine of Linlathen's house, where he was to 
stay during his visit, he and his brother John came to 
my house in Rosebery Crescent, that they might have 
a quiet smoke and talk over matters. They sat with 
me an hour or more, Carlyle as placid and hearty as 
could be, talking most pleasantly, a little dubious, 
ndeed, as to how he might get through his Address, 
but for the rest unperturbed. As to the Address itself, 
when the old man stood up in the Music Hall before 
the assembled crowd, and threw off his Rectorial robes, 
and proceeded to speak, slowly, connectedly, and nobly 
raising his left hand at the end of each section or para- 
graph to stroke the back of his head as he cogitated 
what he was to say next, the crowd listening as they 
had never listened to a speaker before, and reverent 
even in those parts of the hall where he was least 
audible, — who that was present will ever forget that 



THOMAS CARLYLE 115 

sight ? That day, and on the subsequent days of his 
stay, there were, of course, dinners and other gather- 
ings in Carlyle's honour. One such dinner, followed 
by a larger evening gathering, was in my house. Then, 
too, he was in the best of possible spirits, courteous in 
manner and in speech to all, and throwing himself 
heartily into whatever turned up. At the dinner- 
table, I remember, Lord Neaves favoured us with one 
or two of his humorous songs or recitatives, includ- 
ing his clever quiz called " Stuart Mill on Mind and 
Matter," written to the tune of " Roy's wife of Aldival- 
loch." No one enjoyed the thing more than Carlyle ; 
and he surprised me by doing what I had never heard 
him do before, — actually joining with his own voice in 
the chorus. " Stuart Mill on Mind and Matter, Stuart 
Mill on Mind and Matter," he chaunted laughingly 
along with Lord Neaves every time the chorus came 
round, beating time in the air emphatically with his 
fist. It was hardly otherwise, or only otherwise inas- 
much as the affair was more ceremonious and stately, 
at the dinner given to him in the Douglas Hotel by 
the Senatus Academicus, and in which his old friend 
Sir David Brewster presided. There, too, while 
dignified and serene, Carlyle was thoroughly sym- 
pathetic and convivial. Especially I remember how 
he relished and applauded the songs of our academic 
laureate and matchless chief in such things, Professor 
Douglas Maclagan, and how, before we broke up, he 



n6 FAMOUS SCOTS 

expressly complimented Professor Maclagan on having 
" contributed so greatly to the hilarity of the evening." ' * 
The most graphic account of Carlyle's installation as 
Lord Rector is that by Alexander Smith, the author of 
'A Life Drama,' 'Summer in Skye,' &c, &c, whose 
lamented death took place a few months after that event. 
' Curious stories,' he wrote, ' are told of the eagerness 
on every side manifested to hear Mr Carlyle. Country 
clergymen from beyond Aberdeen came to Edinburgh 
for the sole purpose of hearing and seeing. Gentlemen 
came down from London by train the night before, and 
returned to London by train the night after. Nay, it 
was even said that an enthusiast, dwelling in the remote 
west of Ireland, intimated to the officials who had charge 
of the distribution, that if a ticket should be reserved 
for him, he would gladly come the whole way to Edin- 
burgh. Let us hope a ticket was reserved. On the 
day of the address, the doors of the Music Hall were 
besieged long before the hour of opening had arrived ; 
and loitering about there on the outskirts of the crowd, 
one could not help glancing curiously down Pitt Street, 
towards the " lang toun of Kirkcaldy," dimly seen be- 
yond the Forth ; for on the sands there, in the early 
years of the century, Edward Irving was accustomed 
to pace up and down solitarily, and "as if the sands 
were his own," people say, who remember, when they 
were boys, seeing the tall, ardent, black-haired, swift- 
* Masson's ' Carlyle Personally and in his Writings,' pp. 27-9. 



THOMAS CARLYLE 117 

gestured, squinting man, often enough. And to Kirk- 
caldy, too, .... came young Carlyle from Edinburgh 
College, wildly in love with German and mathematics ; 
and the schoolroom in which these men taught, 
although incorporated in Provost Swan's manufactory, 
is yet kept sacred and intact, and but little changed 
these fifty years — an act of hero-worship for which the 
present and other generations may be thankful. It 
seemed to me that so glancing Fife-wards, and thinking 
of that noble friendship — of the David and Jonathan 
of so many years agone — was the best preparation for 
the man I was to see, and the speech I was to hear. 
David and Jonathan ! Jonathan stumbled and fell 
on the dark hills, not of Gilboa, but of Vanity ; and 
David sang his funeral song : " But for him I had 
never known what the communion of man with man 
means. His was the freest, brotherliest, bravest human 
soul mine ever came in contact with. I call him, on 
the whole, the best man I have ever, after trial enough, 
found in this world, or now hope to find." 

' In a very few minutes after the doors were opened, 
the large hall was filled in every part ; and when up 
the central passage the Principal, the Lord Rector, 
the Members of the Senate, and other gentlemen 
advanced towards the platform, the cheering was voci- 
ferous and hearty. The Principal occupied the chair, 
of course ; the Lord Rector on his right, the Lord 
Provost on his left. When the platform gentlemen 



fi8 FAMOUS SCOTS 

had taken their seats, every eye was fixed on the 
Rector. To all appearance, as he sat, time and labour 
had dealt tenderly with him. His face had not yet 
lost the country bronze which he brought up with 
him from Dumfriesshire as a student, fifty-six years 
ago. His long residence in London had not touched 
his Annandale look, nor had it — as we soon learned — 
touched his Annandale accent. His countenance was 
striking, homely, sincere, truthful — the countenance of 
a man on whom " the burden of the unintelligible 
world " had weighed more heavily than on most. His 
hair was yet almost dark ; his moustache and short 
beard were iron-grey. His eyes were wide, melan- 
choly, sorrowful ; and seemed as if they had been at 
times a-weary of the sun. Altogether, in his aspect 
there was something aboriginal, as of a piece of 
unhewn granite, which had never been polished to 
any approved pattern, whose natural and original 
vitality had never been tampered with. In a word, 
there seemed no passivity about Mr Carlyle ; he 
was the diamond, and the world was his pane of glass ; 
he was a graving tool, rather than a thing graven upon 
— a man to set his mark on the world — a man on 

whom the world could not set its mark The 

proceedings began by the conferring of the degree of 
LL.D. on Mr Erskine of Linlathen — an old friend of 
Mr Carlyle's — on Professors Huxley, Tyndall, and 
Ramsay, and on Dr Rae, the Arctic explorer. That 



THOMAS CARLYLE 119 

done, amid a tempest of cheering and hats enthusias- 
tically waved, Mr Carlyle, slipping off his Rectorial 
robe — which must have been a very shirt of Nessus to 
him — advanced to the table, and began to speak in 
low, wavering, melancholy tones, which were in accord- 
ance with the melancholy eyes, and in the Annandale 
accent with which his play-fellows must have been 
familiar long ago. So self-centred was he, so impreg- 
nable to outward influences, that all his years of Edin- 
burgh and London life could not impair, even in the 
slightest degree, that. The opening sentences were lost 
in the applause, and when it subsided, the low, plaintive, 
quavering voice was heard going on : "Your enthusiasm 
towards me is very beautiful in itself, however undeserved 
it may be in regard to the object of it. It is a feeling 
honourable to all men, and one well known to myself 
when in a position analogous to your own." And then 
came the Carlylean utterance, with its far-reaching 
reminiscence and sigh over old graves — Father's and 
Mother's, Edward Irving's, John Sterling's, Charles 
Buller's, and all the noble known in past time — and 
with its flash of melancholy scorn. "There are now fifty- 
six years gone, last November, since I first entered your 
city, a boy of not quite fourteen — fifty-six years ago — to 
attend classes here, and gain knowledge of all kinds, I 
knew not what — with feelings of wonder and awe-struck 
expectation ; and now, after a long, long course, this 
is what we have come to. . . . There is something 



120 FAMOUS SCOTS 

touching and tragic, and yet at the same time beautiful, 
to see the third generation, as it weie, of my dear old 
native land, rising up, and saying : Well, you are not 
altogether an unworthy labourer in the vineyard. You 
have toiled through a great variety of fortunes, and 
have had many judges." And thereafter, without aid 
of notes, or paper preparation of any kind, in the same 
wistful, earnest, hesitating voice, and with many a 
touch of quaint humour by the way, which came in 
upon his subject like glimpses of pleasant sunshine, 
the old man talked to his vast audience about the 
origin and function of Universities, the Old Greeks and 
Romans, Oliver Cromwell, John Knox, the excellence 
of silence as compared with speech, the value of 
courage and truthfulness, and the supreme importance 
of taking care of one's health. " There is no kind of 
achievement you could make in the world that is equal 
to perfect health. What to it are nuggets and millions? 
The French financier said, ' Alas ! why is there no 
sleep to be sold?' Sleep was not in the market at 
any quotation." But what need of quoting a speech 
which by this time has been read by everybody ? 
Appraise it as you please, it was a thing per se. Just 
as, if you wish a purple dye, you must fish up the 
Murex ; if you wish ivory, you must go to the East ; 
so if you desire an address such as Edinburgh listened 
to the other day, you must go to Chelsea for it. It 
may not be quite to your taste, but, in any case, there 



THOMAS CARLYLE 121 

is no other intellectual warehouse in which that kind of 
article is kept in stock.' * 

Another eye-witness, Mr Moncure D. Conway, says : 
1 When Carlyle sat down there was an audible sound, 
as of breath long held, by all present ; then a cry from 
the students, an exultation ; they rose up, all arose, 
waving their arms excitedly ; some pressed forward, as 
if wishing to embrace him, or to clasp his knees ; others 
were weeping ; what had been heard that day was more 
than could be reported ; it was the ineffable spirit that 
went forth from the deeps of a great heart and from the 
ages stored up in it, and deep answered unto deep.' 

Immediately after the delivery of the address, Tyn- 
dall telegraphed to Mrs Carlyle this brief message, 'A 
perfect triumph.' That evening she dined at Forster's, 
where she met Dickens and Wilkie Collins. They 
drank Carlyle's health, and to her it was ' a good joy.' 
It was Carlyle's intention to have returned at once to 
London, but he changed his mind, and went for a few 
quiet days at Scotsbrig. When Tyndall was back in 
London Mrs Carlyle got all the particulars of the 
rectorial address from him, and was made perfectly 
happy about it. 

Numberless congratulations poured in upon Mrs 

Carlyle, and for Saturday, April 21st, she had arranged 

a small tea-party. In the morning she wrote her daily 

letter to Carlyle, and in the afternoon she went out in 

* Alexander Smith's 'Sketches and Criticisms,' pp. 101-8. 



122 FAMOUS SCOTS 

her brougham for a drive, taking her little dog with 
her. When near Victoria Gate, Hyde Park, she put 
the dog out to run. ' A passing carriage,' says 

Froude, ' went over its foot She sprang out, 

caught the dog in her arms, took it with her into the 
brougham, and was never more seen alive. The 
coachman went twice round the drive, by Marble Arch 
down to Stanhope Gate, along the Serpentine and 
round again. Coming a second time near to the 
Achilles statue, and surprised to receive no directions, 
he turned round, saw indistinctly that something was 
wrong, and asked a gentleman near to look into the 
carriage. The gentleman told him briefly to take the 
lady to St. George's Hospital, which was not 200 yards 
distant. She was sitting with her hands folded in her 
lap dead.''* 

At the hour she died Carlyle was enjoying the 
1 green solitudes and fresh spring breezes ' of Annan- 
dale, 'quietly but far from happily.' About nine 
o'clock the same night his brother-in-law, Mr Aitken, 
broke the news to him. ' I was sitting in sister Jean's 
at Dumfries,' Carlyle wrote a fortnight after, ' thinking 
of my railway journey to Chelsea on Monday, and 
perhaps of a sprained ankle I had got at Scotsbrig 
two weeks or so before, when the fatal telegrams, two 
of them in succession, came. It had a kind of stun- 
ning effect upon me. Not for above two days could I 
* Froude's ' Life in London,' vol. ii. p. 312. 



THOMAS CARLYLE 123 

estimate the immeasurable depths of it, or the infinite 
sorrow which had peeled my life all bare, and in a 
moment shattered my poor world to universal ruin. 
They took me out next day to wander, as was medi- 
cally needful, in the green sunny Sabbath fields, and 
ever and anon there rose from my sick heart the ejacu- 
lation, " My poor little woman ! " but no full gust of 
tears came to my relief, nor has yet come. Will it 
ever ? A stony " Woe's me, woe's me ! " sometimes 
with infinite tenderness and pity, not for myself, is my 
habitual mood hitherto.' * 

On Monday morning Carlyle and his brother John 
set off for London. On the Wednesday he was on his 
way to Haddington with the remains, his brother and 
John Forster accompanying him. At 1 p.m. on Thurs- 
day the funeral took place. ' In the nave of the old 
Abbey Kirk,' wrote her disconsolate husband, ' long a 
ruin, now being saved from further decay, with the 
skies looking down on her, there sleeps my little 
Jeannie, and the light of her face will never shine 
on me more.' When Mr Conway saw him on his 
return to Cheyne Row, Carlyle said, 'Whatever 
triumph there may have been in that now so darkly 
overcast day, was indeed hers. Long, long years ago, 
she took her place by the side of a poor man of 
humblest condition, against all other provisions for 
her, undertook to share his lot for weal or woe ; and 
* Froude's 'Life in London,' vol. ii. p. 314. 



124 FAMOUS SCOTS 

in that office what she has been to him and done for 
him, how she has placed, as it were, velvet between him 
and all the sharp angularities of existence, remains now 
only in the knowledge of one man, and will presently 
be finally hid in his grave.' As he touchingly expressed 
it in the beautiful epitaph he wrote, the 'light of his 
life' had assuredly 'gone out.' Universal sympathy 
was felt for the bereaved husband, and he was very 
much affected by ' a delicate, graceful, and even affec- 
tionate ' message from the Queen, conveyed by Lady 
Augusta Stanley through his brother John. 

One who knew Mrs Carlyle intimately thus speaks 
of her : ' Her intellect was as clear and incisive as his, 
yet altogether womanly in character ; her heart was as 
truthful, and her courage as unswerving. She was a 
wife in the noblest sense of that tered name. She 
had a gift of literary expression as unique as his ; 
as tender a sympathy with human sorrow and need ; 
as clear an eye for all conventional hypocrisies and 
folly ; as vivid powers of description and illustration ; 
and also, it must be confessed, when the spirit of 
mockery was strong upon her, as keen an edge to her 
flashing wit and humour, and as scornful a disregard of 
the conventional proprieties. But she was no literary 
hermaphrodite. She never intellectually strode forth 
before the world upon masculine stilts ; nor, in private 
life, did she frowardly push to the front, in the vanity 
of showing she was as clever and considerable as her 



THOMAS CARLYLE 125 

husband. She longed, with a true woman's longing 
heart, to be appreciated by him, and by those she 
loved ; and, for her, all extraneous applause might 
whistle with the wind. But if her husband was a king 
in literature, so might she have been a queen. Her 
influence with him for good cannot be questioned by 
any one having eyes to discern. And if she sacrificed 
her own vanity for personal distinction, in order to 
make his work possible for him, who shall say she did 
not choose the nobler and better part ? ' * 

On the other hand, Carlyle was too exacting, and 
when domestic differences arose he abstained from 
paying those little attentions which a delicate and 
sensitive woman might naturally expect from a hus- 
band who was so lavish of terms of endearment in 
the letters he wrote to her when away from her side. 
' Even with that mother whom he so dearly loved,' 
observes Mrs Ireland, 'the intercourse was mainly 
composed of a silent sitting by the fireside of an 
evening in the old " houseplace," with a tranquillising 
pipe of tobacco, or of his returning from his long 
rambles to a simple meal, partaken of in comparative 
silence ; and now and then, at meeting or parting, some 
pious and earnest words from the good soul to her son.'j- 
And it never occurred to Carlyle to act differently with 
his wife, who was pining for his society. In addition 

* Larkin's ' Carlyle and the Open Secret of his Life,' pp. 334-5. 
t ' Life of Jane Welsh Carlyle,' pp. 19 1-2. 



126 FAMOUS SCOTS 

to all that, we have Froude's brief but accurate diag- 
nosis of Carlyle's character. ' If,' he wrote, ' matters 
went well with himself, it never occurred to him that 
they could be going ill with any one else ; and, on 
the other hand, if he was uncomfortable, he required 
everybody to be uncomfortable along with him.' 

There was a strong element of selfishness in that 
phase of Carlyle's nature ; and throughout his letters 
and journal he appears wholly wrapt up in himself and 
in his literary projects, without even a passing allusion 
to the courageous woman who had shared his lot. 
Now and again we alight upon a passage where special 
mention is made of her efforts, but these have all a 
direct or indirect bearing upon his work, his plans, his 
comforts.* 

Carlyle never fully realised what his wife had been 
to him until she was suddenly snatched from his side. 
And this was his testimony : ' I say deliberately, her 

* After reading the above estimate in the proof sheets, Professor 
Masson writes to me as follows : — 

• May I hint that, in the passage about his character and 
domestic relations, you seem hardly to do justice to the depths of 
real kindness and tenderness in him, and the actual couthiness of 
his manner and fireside conversation in his most genial hours? 
He was delightful and loveable at such hours, with a fund of the 
raciest Scottish humour.' 

This is a side of Carlyle's nature which would naturally be hidden 
from the general reader, and from Mr Froude. It is easy to 
imagine how Carlyle's genial humour, frozen at its source in the 
company of the solemnly pessimistic Froude, should be thawed 
by the presence of ' a brither Scot.' 



THOMAS CARLYLE 127 

part in the stern battle, and except myself none knows 
how stern, was brighter and braver than my own.' In 
one of those terrible moments of self-upbraiding the 
grief-stricken husband exclaims : ' Blind and deaf that 
we are ; oh, think, if thou yet love anybody living, wait 
not till death sweep down the paltry little dust-clouds 
and idle dissonances of the moment, and all be at last 
so mournfully clear and beautiful, when it is too late ! ' 

In a pamphlet quoted by Mrs Ireland we have 
a pathetic picture of Carlyle in his lonely old age. 
A Mr Swinton, an American gentleman on a visit to 
this country, went to see the grave of Mrs Carlyle. 

In conversation the grave-digger said : ' Mr Carlyle 
comes here from London now and then to see this 
grave. He is a gaunt, shaggy, weird kind of old man, 
looking very old the last time he was here.' ' He is 
eighty-six now,' said I. ' Ay,' he repeated, eighty-six, 
and comes here to this grave all the way from London.' 
And I told him that Carlyle was a great man, the 
greatest man of the age in books, and that his name 
was known all over the world ; but he thought there 
were other great men lying near at hand, though 
I told him their fame did not reach beyond the 
graveyard, and brought him back to talk of Carlyle. 
1 Mr Carlyle himself,' said the gravedigger softly, ' is 
to be brought here to be buried with his wife. Ay, he 
comes here lonesome and alone,' continued the grave- 
digger, 'when he visits the wife's grave. His niece 



128 FAMOUS SCOTS 

keeps him company to the gate, but he leaves her 

there, and she stays there for him. The last time he 

was here I got a sight of him, and he was bowed down 

under his white hairs, and he took his way up by that 

ruined wall of the old cathedral, and round there and 

in here by the gateway, and he tottered up here to 

this spot.' Softly spake the gravedigger, and paused. 

Softer still, in the broad dialect of the Lothians, he 

proceeded : — " And he stood here awhile in the grass, 

and then he kneeled down and stayed on his knees at 

the grave ; then he bent over and I saw him kiss the 

ground — ay, he kissed it again and again, and he kept 

kneeling, and it was a long time before he rose and 

tottered out of the cathedral, and wandered through 

the graveyard to the gate, where his niece was waiting 

for him." This is the epitaph composed by Carlyle, 

and engraved on the tombstone of Dr John Welsh in 

the chancel of Haddington Church : — 

1 Here likewise now rests Jane Welsh Carlyle, Spouse 
of Thomas Carlyle, Chelsea, London. She was born 
at Haddington, 14.TH July 1801, only daughter of the 
above Tohn Welsh, and of Grace Welsh, Capelgill, 
Dumfriesshire, his wife. In her bright existence she 
had more sorrows than are common ; but also a soft 
invincibility, a clearness of discernment, and a noble 
loyalty of heart which are rare. for forty years 
she was the true and ever-loving helpmate of her 
husband, and, by act and word, unweariedly forwarded 
him as none else could, in all of worthy that he did 
or attempted. slie died at london, 2ist april l866, 
suddenly snatched away from him, and the light of 
his life as if gone out.' 



CHAPTER VII 

LAST YEARS AND DEATH OF CARLYLE 

In presence of the pathetically tragic spectacle of 
Carlyle in his old age, who can have the heart to enter 
into his domestic life and weigh with pedantic scales 
the old man's blameworthiness ? Carlyle survived his 
wife fifteen years. His brother John, himself a widower, 
was anxious that they should live together, but it was 
otherwise arranged. John returned to Scotland, and 
Carlyle remained alone in Cheyne Row. He was 
prevailed on to visit Ripple Court, near Walmer, and 
on his return to London he wrote, ' My home is very 
gaunt and lonesome ; but such is my allotment hence- 
forth in this world. I have taken loyally to my vacant 
circumstances, and will try to do my best with them.' 

Carlyle's first public appearance after his sore bereave- 
ment was as chairman of the Eyre Committee as a pro- 
test against Governor Eyre's recall. ' Poor Eyre ! ' he 
wrote to a correspondent, ' I am heartily sorry for him, 
and for the English nation, which makes such a dismal 
fool of itself. Eyre, it seems, has fallen suddenly from 
;£6ooo a year into almost zero, and has a large family 

I I 12 9 



130 FAMOUS SCOTS 

and needy kindred dependent on him. Such his reward 
for saving the West Indies, and hanging one incendiary 
mulatto, well worth the gallows, if I can judge.' 

Carlyle accepted a pressing invitation to stay with 
the Ashburtons at Mentone, and on the 22 nd of 
December he started thither with Professor Tyndall. 
He was greatly benefited in health, and at intervals 
made some progress with his Reminisce?iccs. He re- 
turned to London in March, and on the 4th of April 
1867 he writes in his journal : ' Idle ! Idle ! My em- 
ployments mere trifles of business, and that of dwelling 
on the days that culminated on the 21st of last year.' 
About this time his thoughts were directed to the 
estate of Craigenputtock, of which he became absolute 
owner at his wife's death. All her relations on the 
father's side were dead, and as Carlyle thought that it 
ought not to lapse to his own family, he determined to 
leave it to the University of Edinburgh, ' the rents of 
it to be laid out in supporting poor and meritorious 
students there, under the title of " the John Welsh 
Bursaries." Her name he could not give, because she 
had taken his own. Therefore he gave her father's.' 

On June 22nd, he writes in his journal: 'Finished 
off on Thursday last, at three p.m. 20th of June, my 
poor bequest of Craigenputtock to Edinburgh University 
for bursaries. All quite ready there, Forster and 
Froude as witnesses ; the good Professor Masson, who 
had taken endless pains, alike friendly and wise, being 



THOMAS CARLYLE 131 

at the very last objected to in the character of " wit- 
ness," as "a party interested," said the Edinburgh 
lawyer. I a little regretted this circumstance ; so I 
think did Masson secretly. He read us the deed with 
sonorous emphasis, bringing every word and note of it 
home to us. Then I signed ; then they two — Masson 
witnessing only with his eyes and mind. I was deeply 
moved, as I well might be, but held my peace and 
shed no tears. Tears I think I have done with ; 
never, except for moments together, have I wept for 
that catastrophe of April 21, to which whole days of 
weeping would have been in other times a blessed 
relief. . . . This is my poor "Sweetheart Abbey," 
" Cor Dulce," or New Abbey, a sacred casket and 
tomb for the sweetest " heart " which, in this bad, bitter 
world, was all my own. Darling, darling ! and in a 
little while we shall both be at rest, and the Great God 
will have done with us what was His will.'* 

When the Tories were preparing to ' dish the 
Whigs ' over the Reform Bill, Carlyle felt impelled to 
write a pamphlet, which he called Shooting Niagara, 
and After. It was his final utterance on British 
politics. Proof sheets and revisions for new editions of 
his works engrossed his attention for some time. He 
went annually to Scotland, and devoted a great deal of 
time on his return to Chelsea to the sorting and 
annotating of his wife's letters. 

* Froude's ' Life in London,' vol. ii. p. 34.6. 



1 32 FAMOUS SCOTS 

Early in 1869 the Queen expressed a wish, through 
Dean Stanley, to become personally acquainted with 
Carlyle. The meeting took place at Westminster 
Deanery : ' The Queen,' Carlyle said, ' was really very 
gracious and pretty in her demeanour throughout j rose 
greatly in my esteem by everything that happened ; did 
not fall in any point. The interview was quietly very 
mournful to me ; the one point of real interest, a 
sombre thought : " Alas ! how would it have cheered 
her, bright soul, for my sake, had she been 
there ! " ' 

When Carlyle was in constant expectation of his end, 
he — in June 1871 — brought to Mr Froude's house a 
large parcel of papers. ' He put it in my hands,' says 
Froude. ' He told me to take it simply and absolutely 
as my own, without reference to any other person or 
persons, and to do with it as I pleased after he was 
gone. He explained, when he saw me surprised, that 
it was an account of his wife's history, that it was 
incomplete, that he could himself form no opinion 
whether it ought to be published or not, that he could 
do no more to it, and must pass it over to me. He 
wished never to hear of it again. I must judge. I 
must publish it, the whole, or part — or else destroy it 
all, if I thought that this would be the wiser thing to 
do.'* 

Three years later Carlyle sent to Froude his own 
* Froude's ' Life in London,' vol. ii. pp. 408-9. 



THOMAS CARLYLE 133 

and his wife's private papers, journals, correspondence, 
reminiscences, and other documents. ' Take them,' he 
said to Froude, ' and do what you can with them. All 
I can say to you is, Burn freely. If you have any 
affection for me, the more you burn the better.' Mr 
Froude burnt nothing, and it was well, he says, that he 
did not, for a year before his death he desired him, 
when he had done with the MSS., to give them to his 
niece. ' The new task which had been laid upon me,' 
writes Froude in his biography of Carlyle, ' complicated 
the problem of the " Letters and Memorials." My 
first hope was, that, in the absence of further definite 
instructions from himself, I might interweave parts of 
Mrs Carlyle's letters with his own correspondence in 
an ordinary narrative, passing lightly over the rest, and 
touching the dangerous places only so far as was 
unavoidable. In this view I wrote at leisure the 
greatest part of " the first forty years " of his life. The 
evasion of the difficulty was perhaps cowardly, but it 
was not unnatural. I was forced back, however, into 
the straighter and better course.' The outcome of it 
all is too well-known to call for recapitulation here. 

In February 1874, the Emperor of Germany con- 
ferred upon Carlyle the Order of Merit which the 
great Frederick had himself founded. He could not 
refuse it, but he remarked, ' Were it ever so well meant, 
it can be of no value to me whatever. Do thee neither 
ill na gude.' Ten months later, Mr Disraeli, then 



134 FAMOUS SCOTS 

Premier, offered him the Grand Cross of the Bath 
along with a pension. Carlyle gracefully declined 
both. 

Upon his 8oth birthday, Carlyle was presented with 
a gold medal from Scottish friends and admirers, and 
with a letter from Prince Bismarck, both of which he 
valued highly. His last public act was to write a letter 
of three or four lines to the Times, which he explains to 
his brother in this fashion : ' After much urgency and 
with a dead-lift effort, I have this day [5th May 1877] 
got issued through the Times a small indispensable de- 
liverance on the Turk and Dizzy question. Dizzy, 
it appears, to the horror of those who have any interest 
in him and his proceedings, has decided to have a new 
war for the Turk against all mankind ; and this letter 
hopes to drive a nail through his mad and maddest 
speculations on that side.' 

Froude tells us that Carlyle continued to read the 
Bible, ' the significance of which ' he found ' deep and 
wonderful almost as much as it ever used to be.' The 
Bible and Shakespeare remained ' the best books " to 
him that were ever written. 

The death of his brother John was a severe shock 
to Carlyle, for they were deeply attached to each 
other. When he bequeathed Craigenputtock to the 
University of Edinburgh, John Carlyle settled a 
handsome sum for medical bursaries there, to encourage 
poor students. ' These two brothers,' Froude remarks, 



THOMAS CARLYLE 135 

' born in a peasant's home in Annandale, owing little 
themselves to an Alma Mater which had missed 
discovering their merits, were doing for Scotland's 
chief University what Scotland's peers and merchants, 
with their palaces and deer forests and social splendour, 
had, for some cause, too imperfectly supplied.' 

In the autumn of 1880, Carlyle became very infirm; 
in January he was visibly sinking ; and on the 5th of 
February 1881, he passed away in his eighty- fifth year. 
In accordance with his expressed wishes, they buried 
him in the old kirkyard of Ecclefechan with his own 
people. 

At his death Carlyle's fame was at its zenith. A 
revulsion of feeling was caused by the publication of 
Froude's Life of Carlyle and the Reminiscences. In 
regard to the former, great dissatisfaction was created 
by the somewhat unflattering portrait painted by 
Froude. Was Froude justified in presenting to the 
public Carlyle in all grim realism? The answer to 
this depends upon one's notions of literary ethics. The 
view of the average biographer is that he must suppress 
faults and give prominence to virtues. The result is 
that the majority of biographies are simply expanded 
funeral sermons ; instead of a life-like portrait we have 
a glorified mummy. Boswell's Johnson stands at the 
head of biographies; but, if Boswell had followed the con- 
ventional method, his book would long since have passed 
into obscurity. It is open to dispute whether Froude 



136 FAMOUS SCOTS 

has not overdone the sombre elements in Carlyle's life. 
Readers of Professor Masson's little book, which shows 
Carlyle in a more genially human mood, have good 
reason to suspect that Froude has given too much 
emphasis to the Rembrandtesque element in Carlyle's 
life. At the time of the publication of the Reminis- 
cences a furious hubbub arose regarding Mr Froude's 
editorial wisdom. In the course of the controversy 
the present writer wrote an article, which he for- 
warded to Mr Froude, who replied in a letter which, 
at his own request, was kept private. The dispute is 
long since ended, and there is no further need of 
withholding the letter from publication. It runs as 
follows : 

' 5 Onslow Gardens, S.W., 
'April 24, 1882. 

1 Dear Sir, — I return your article which is (or was 
when it appeared) a rational protest against an alto- 
gether foolish outcry. No one except myself was in a 
position to know what ought and what ought not to be 
published. You are mistaken only in supposing that 
Carlyle's family interposed. Mrs Alexander Carlyle 
wrote letters to the papers, but Mr Carlyle's surviving 
brothers and sisters did not support her. They were 
content with Mr Carlyle's own arrangements, and did 
not interfere in any way. I mention this merely for 
yourself. You will, 0/ course, make no public use of this 



THOMAS CARLYLE 137 

information. If they wish to take any public part in 
this controversy they must choose their own time. 

' The clamour last year was, I believe, the work of 
two or three individuals. When people do not know 
what to say or think, they follow the first voice that 
makes itself heard, — as the pack follows the first dog 
that gives tongue. But they generally come right on 
calm reflection. 

' Your faithful servant, 

' J. A Froude.' 



CHAPTER VIII 

CARLYLE AS A SOCIAL AND POLITICAL THINKER 

In his essay on Carlyle, Mr John Morley utters a protest 
against the habit of labelling great men with names. 
After making every allowance for the waywardness of 
the men of intuitive and poetic insight, it remains true 
that between the speculative and the practical sides of 
a great thinker's mind there is a potent, though subtle, 
connection. For those who take the trouble of search- 
ing, there is discoverable such a connection between 
the speculative ideas of Carlyle and his practical out- 
look upon civilisation. Given a thinker who lays stress 
upon the emotional side of progress, and we have a 
thinker who will take for heroes men of mystical 
tendencies, of strong dominating passions, a thinker 
who will value progress not by the increase of worldly 
comfort, but by the increase in the number of magnetic, 
epoch-making personalities. Naturally, we hear Carlyle 
remark that the history of the world is at bottom the 
history of its great men. 

Carlyle's fanatical adoption of intuitionalism has told 

banefully upon his work in sociology. Trusting to his 

138 



THOMAS CARLYLE 139 

inner light, to what we might call Mystical Quakerism, 
Carlyle has dispensed with a rational theory of progress. 
Before a sociological problem, his attitude is not that of 
the patient thinker, but of the hysterical prophet, whose 
emotions find outlet in declamatory denunciation. Like 
the prophets of old, Carlyle tends towards Pessimism. 
His golden age is in the past. When Past and Present 
appeared, many earnest-minded men, captivated by the 
style and spirit of the book, hailed Carlyle as a social 
reformer. As an attempt to solve the social problem, 
Past and Present is not a success. Carlyle could do 
no more than tell the modern to return to the spirit of 
the feudal period, when the people were led by the 
aristocracy. It showed considerable audacity on 
Carlyle's part to come to the interpretation of history 
with no theory of progress, no message to the world 
beyond the vaguely declamatory one that those nations 
will be turned into hell which forget God. Of what 
value is such writing as this, taken from the introduc- 
tion to his Cromwell?: — ' Here of our own land and 
lineage in English shape were heroes on the earth once 
more, who knew in every fibre and with heroic daring 
laid to heart that an Almighty Justice does verily rule 
this world, that it is good to fight on God's side, and 
bad to fight on the Devil's side ! The essence of all 
heroism and veracities that have been or will be.' This 
is simply a reproduction of Jewish theocratic ideas ; 
indeed, except for the details, Carlyle might as readily 



i 4 o FAMOUS SCOTS 

have written a life of Moses as of Cromwell. In 
the eyes of Carlyle, human life was what it was to 
Bunyan, a kind of pilgrim's progress ; only in the 
Carlylean creed it is all battle and no victory, all 
Valley of Humiliation and no Delectable Mountain. 
Naturally, where no stress is laid upon collective action, 
where individual reason is depreciated, progress is 
associated with the rise of abnormal individualities, 
men of strong wills like Cromwell and Frederick. 
With Rousseau, Carlyle appears to look upon civilisa- 
tion as a disease. In one of his essays, Characteristics, 
he goes near the Roussean idea when he declaims 
against self-consciousness, and deliberately gives a 
preference to instinct. The uses of great men are 
to lead humanity away from introspection back to 
energetic, rude, instinctive action. When humanity 
will not listen to the voice of the prophets, it must be 
treated to whip and scorpion. It never dawned upon 
Carlyle that the highest life, individual and collective, 
has roots in physical laws, that politico-economic forces 
must be reckoned with before social harmony can be 
reached. 

Just as Carlyle's Idealism drove him into opposition 
to the utilitarian theory of morals, so it drove him into 
opposition to the utilitarian theory of society. Out of 
his idealistic way of looking upon life there flowed a 
curious result. As early as Sartor Resartus we find 
Carlyle anticipating the evolutionary conception of 



THOMAS CARLYLE 141 

society. Spencer has familiarised us with the idea 
that society is an organism. The idea which he 
received from the Germans that Nature is not a mere 
mechanical collection of ]atoms, but the materialised 
expression of a spiritual unity — that idea Carlyle 
extended to society. As he puts it in Sartor Re- 
sartus : ' Yes, truly, if Nature is one, and a living 
indivisible whole, much more is Mankind, the Image 
that reflects and creates Nature, without which Nature 
were not. . . . Noteworthy also, and serviceable for 
the progress of this same individual, wilt thou find his 
subdivisions into Generations. Generations are as the 
Days of toilsome Mankind ; Death and Birth are the 
vesper and the matin bells, that summon Mankind to 
sleep, and to rise refreshed for new advancement. 
What the Father has made, the Son can make and 
enjoy ; but has also work of his own appointed him. 
Thus all things wax and roll onwards. . . . Find man- 
kind where thou wilt, thou findest it in living move- 
ment, in progress faster or slower ; the Phcenix soars 
aloft, hovers with outstretched wings, filling Earth with 
her music ; or as now, she sinks, and with spheral 
swan-song immolates herself in flame, that she may soar 
the higher and sing the clearer.' 

Philosophies of civilisation have a tendency to beget 
Fatalism. Bent upon watching the resistless play of 
general laws, philosophers, in their admiration of the 
products, are apt to ignore the frightful suffering and 



1 42 FAMOUS SCOTS 

waste involved in the process. Society being an 
organism, a thing of development, t^e duty of thinkers 
is to demonstrate the nature of sociological laws, and 
allow them free scope for operation. To this is due 
much of the apparent hardness of Eighteenth Century 
political speculation, which, beginning with the French 
Physiocratic School, culminated in the works of Adam 
Smith, Ricardo, Bentham, and the two Mills. With 
those thinkers, the one palpable lesson of the past 
was the duty of abstaining from interference with the 
general process of social development. Give man 
liberty, said the Utilitarian Radicals, and he will 
work out his own salvation : from the play of indi- 
vidual self-interest, social harmony will result. 

Carlyle is frequently thought of as a Conservative 
force in politics. In some respects he was mere 
Radical than the Benthams and the Mills. His 
deeper ideal conception of society intensified his dis- 
satisfaction with society as it existed. In fact, to 
Carlyle's attack upon those institutions, beliefs and 
ceremonies which had no better basis than mere 
unreasoning authority, most of the Radicalism of the 
early ' forties ' was due. Conceive what effect lan- 
guage like this must have had upon thoughtful, high- 
souled young men : ' Call ye that a Society, where 
there is no longer any Social Idea extant ; not so 
much as the Idea of a common Home, but only of 
a common overcrowded Lodging-house ? Where each, 



THOMAS CARLYLE 



M3 



isolated, regardless of his neighbour, turned against his 
neighbour, clutches what he can get, and cries "Mine!" 
and calls it Peace because, in the cut-purse and cut- 
throat Scramble, no steel knives, but only a far cun- 
ninger sort, can be employed? Where Friendship, 
Communion, has become an incredible tradition ; and 
your holiest Sacramental Supper is a smoking Tavern 
Dinner, with Cook for Evangelist ? Where your Priest 
has no tongue but for plate-licking ; and your high 
Guides and Governors cannot guide ; but on all hands 
hear it passionately proclaimed: Laissez faire ; leave 
us alone of your guidance, such light is darker than 
darkness ; eat your wages and sleep. Thus, too, must 
an observant eye discern everywhere that saddest spec- 
tacle : the Poor perishing, like neglected, foundered 
Draught-Cattle, of Hunger and Overwork ; the Rich, 
still more wretchedly, of Idleness, Satiety, and Over- 
growth. The Highest in rank, at length, without 
honour from the Lowest ; scarcely, with a little mouth- 
honour, as from tavern-waiters who expect to put it in 
the bill. Once sacred Symbols fluttering as empty 
Pageants, whereof men grudge even the expense; a 
World becoming dismantled: in one word, the 
CHURCH fallen speechless, from obesity and apo- 
plexy; the STATE shrunken into a Police-Office, 
straitened to get its pay!' 

It was when suggesting a remedy that Carlyle's 
Idealistic Radicalism parted company with Utili- 



144 FAMOUS SCOTS 

tarian Radicalism. Failing to see that society was 
in a transition period, a period so vrell described by 
Herbert Spencer as the movement from Militarism to 
Industrialism, in which there was a severe conflict of 
ideals, opinions, and interests, Carlyle sought for the 
remedy in a return to a form of society which had 
been outgrown. There was surely something patheti- 
cally absurd in the spectacle of a great teacher en- 
deavouring to cure social and political diseases by 
preaching the resuscitation of Puritanism at a time 
when the intellect of the day was parting company 
with theocratic conceptions. Equally absurd was it 
to offer as a remedy for social anarchy the despotism 
of ambitious rulers at a time when society was suffering 
from the effects of previous despotism. Equally irrele- 
vant was the attempt in Past and Present to get re- 
formers to model modern institutions on those of the 
Middle Ages. Carlyle's remedy for the evils of liberty 
was a return to the apron-strings of despotism. Carlyle, 
in fact, forgot his conception of society as a developing 
organism ; he endeavoured to arrest progress at the 
autocratic stage, because of his ignorance of the laws 
of progress and his lack of sympathy with democratic 
ideas. Still, the value of Carlyle's political writings 
should not be overlooked. The Utilitarian Radicals 
laid themselves open to the charge of intellectual 
superstition. They worshipped human nature as a 
fetish. Lacking clear views of social evolution, they 



THOMAS CARLYLE 145 

overlooked the relativity of political terms. Ignorant 
of the conception of human nature to which Spencer 
has accustomed us, the old Radicals treated it as 
a constant quantity which only needed liberty for its 
proper development. In their eagerness to discard 
theology, they discarded the truth of man's depravity 
which finds expression in the creed of the Churches. 
We have changed all that. We now realise the fact 
that political institutions are good or bad, not as they 
stand or fall when tested by the first principles of a 
rationalistic philosophy, but as they harmonise or con- 
flict with existing phases of human nature. 

If in the sphere of industrialism Carlyle as a guide 
is untrustworthy, great is his merit as an inspirer. His 
influence was needed to counteract the cold prosaic 
narrowness of the Utilitarian teaching. He called 
attention to an aspect of the economic question which 
the Utilitarian Radicals ignored, namely, the inade- 
quacy of self-interest as a social bond. To Carlyle is 
largely due the higher ethical conceptions and quick- 
ened sympathies which now exist in the spheres of 
social and industrial relationships. Unhappily his im- 
plicit faith in intuitionalism led him to deride political 
economy and everything pertaining to man's material 
life. Much there was in the writings of the economists 
to call for severe criticism, and if Carlyle had treated 
the subject with discrimination he would have been a 
power for good ; but he chose to pour the vials of his 
1 K 



146 FAMOUS SCOTS 

contempt upon political economy as a science, and 
upon modern industrial arrangements, with the result 
that many of the most intelligent students of sociology 
have been repelled from his writings. In this respect 
he contrasts very unfavourably with Mill, who, notwith- 
standing the temptations to intellectual arrogance from 
his one-sided training, with quite a chivalrous regard 
for truth, was ever ready to accept light and leading 
from thinkers who differed from him in temperament 
and methods. There may be conflicting opinions 
as to which of the two men was intellectually 
the greater, but there can be no doubt that Mill 
dwelt in an atmosphere of intellectual serenity and 
nobility far removed from the foggy turbulence in 
which Carlyle lived, moved, and had his being. 
Between the saintly apostle of Progress and the 
barbaric representative of Reaction there was a great 
gulf fixed. 

As was natural, the Latter-day Pamphlets were 
treated as a series of political ravings. For that 
estimate Carlyle himself was largely responsible. He 
deprived himself of the sympathy of intelligent readers 
by the violence of his invective and the lack of dis- 
crimination in his abuse. Much of what Carlyle said 
is to be found in Mill's Representative Government, 
said, too, in a quiet, rational style, which commands 
attention and respect. Mill, no more than Carlyle, 
was a believer in mob rule. He did not think that 



THOMAS CARLYLE 147 

the highest wisdom was to be had by the counting of 
heads. Thinkers like Mill and Spencer did not deem 
it necessary to pour contempt on modern tendencies. 
They suggested remedies on the lines of these tendencies. 
They did not try to put back the hands on the clock of 
time ; they sought to remove perturbing influences. 
Much of the evil has arisen from men trying to do by 
political methods what should not be done by these 
methods. Carlyle's idea that Government should do 
this, that, and the other thing has wrought mischief, in- 
asmuch as it has led to an undue belief in the virtues 
of Government interference. His writings are largely 
responsible for the evils he predicted. 

It is curious to notice how, with all his belief in 
individualism, Carlyle, in political matters, was un- 
consciously driven in the direction of socialism. Get 
your great man, worship him, and render him obedience 
— such was the Carlylean recipe for modern diseases. 
Suppose the great man found, how is he to proceed ? 
In these democratic days, he can only proceed by 
ruling despotically with the popular consent ; in other 
words, there will follow a regime of paternalism and 
fraternalism, the practical outcome of which would be 
Socialism. Carlyle himself never suspected how childish 
was his conception of national life. He wrote of his 
Great Man theory as if it was a discovery, whereas the 
most advanced races had long since passed through it, 
and those which were not advanced were precisely 



148 FAMOUS SCOTS 

those which had not been able to shake themselves 
free of paternal despotism. On this point the criticism 
of the late Professor Minto goes to the heart of the 
matter : ' Carlyle's doctrines are the first suggestions of 
an earnest man, adhered to with unreasoning tenacity. 
As a rule, with no exception, that is worth naming, they 
take account mainly of one side of a case. He was too 
impatient of difficulties, and had too little respect for 
the wisdom and experience of others to submit to be 
corrected : opposition rather confirmed him in his own 
opinion. Most of his practical suggestions had already 
been made before, and judged impracticable upon 
grounds which he could not, or would not, understand. 
His modes of dealing with pauperism and crime were 
in full operation under the despotism of Henry VII. 
and Henry VIII. His theory of a hero-king, which 
means in practice an accidentally good and able man 
in a series of indifferent or bad despots, had been more 
frequently tried than any other political system ; Asia 
at this moment contains no government that is not 
despotic. His views in other departments of knowledge 
are also chiefly determined by the strength of his un- 
reasoning impulses.' 

In his interesting Recollections Mr Espinasse states 
that during the time that Carlyle was writing on the 
labour question, not a single blue-book was visible on 
his table ! To Carlyle's influence must be traced 
much of the sentimental treatment of social and in- 



THOMAS CARLYLE 149 

dustrial questions which has followed the unpopularity 
of political economy. It is only fair to Carlyle to note, 
that at times he had qualms as to the superiority of his 
paternal theory of government over Laissez Faire. In 
one place he admits that even Frederick could not 
have superintended the great emigration movement to 
such good effect as was done by the spontaneous efforts 
of nature. In the social sphere Carlyle was false to his 
doctrine of spontaneity. In his early essays he was 
perpetually condemning mechanical interference with 
society, and contending that free play should be given to 
the dynamic agencies. Untrue to himself and his creed, 
Carlyle in his later books was constantly denounc- 
ing Government for neglecting to apply mechanical 
remedies for social diseases. In his view, the duty of 
a ruler was not to work in harmony with social im- 
pulses, but to cut and carve institutions in harmony 
with the ideas of great men. Puritanism under Crom- 
well failed because it was forgotten that society is an 
organism, not a piece of clay, to be moulded according 
to the notions of heroic potters. Strictly speaking, 
Frederick and Cromwell should be classed with the 
Latter Day Pamphlets. In the Pamphlets Carlyle de- 
claims against democratic methods, and in Frederick 
and Cromwell we are presented with incarnations of 
autocratic methods. 

Of all the critics of Carlyle, no one has surpassed 
Mr Morley in indicating the mischievous effects which 



i$o FAMOUS SCOTS 

flow from the elevation of mere will power and 
emotional force into guides in social and political 
questions. As Mr Morley says : ' The dictates of a 
kind heart are of superior force to the maxims of 
political economy ; swift and peremptory resolution is 
a safer guide than a balancing judgment. If the will 
works easily and surely, we may assume the rectitude 
of the moving impulse. All this is no caricature of a 
system which sets sentiment, sometimes hard senti- 
ment, above reason and method. In other words, the 
writer who in these days has done more than anybody 
else to fire men's hearts with a feeling for right, and an 
eager desire for social activity, has, with deliberate 
contempt, thrust away from him the only instru- 
ments by which we can make sure what right is, 
and that our social action is effective. A born poet, 
only wanting perhaps a clearer feeling for form and a 
more delicate spiritual self-possession to have added 
another name to the illustrious band of English 
singers, he has been driven by the impetuosity of 
his sympathies to attack the scientific side of social 
questions in an imaginative and highly emotional 
manner.' 

Had Carlyle confined himself to description of 
social, industrial, and political diseases, he would have 
had an unsullied reputation in the sphere of spiritual 
dynamics, but flaws immediately appeared when he 
endeavoured to prescribe remedies. Many of his 



THOMAS CARLYLE 151 

remedies were too vague to be of use ; where they 
were specific, they were so Quixotic as to be useless. 
His proposals for dealing with labour and pauperism 
never imposed on any sensible man on this side of 
cloud-land. 



CHAPTER IX 

CARLYLE AS AN INSPIRATIONAL FORCE 

It is the misfortune of the critic, the historian, and 
the sociologist to be superseded. In the march of 
events the specialist is fated to be left behind. The 
influence of the inspirationalist is ever-enduring. As 
the present writer has elsewhere said : — Carlyle has 
been called a prophet. The word in these days 
has only a vague meaning. Probably Carlyle earned 
the name in consequence of the oracular and 
denunciatory elements in his later writings. Then, 
again, the word prophet has come to be associated 
with the thought of a foreteller of future events. 
A prophet in the true sense of the word is not one 
who foretells the future, but one who revives and keeps 
alive in the minds of his contemporaries a vivid sense 
of the great elemental facts of life. Why is it that the 
Bible attracts to its pages men of all kinds of tempera- 
ment and all degrees of culture ? Because in it, 
especially in the Psalms, Job, and the writings of 
Isaiah and his brother prophets, serious people are 
brought face to face with the great mysteries, God, 
153 



THOMAS CARLYLE 153 

Nature, Man, Death, etc. — mysteries, however, which 
only rush in upon the soul of man in full force on 
special occasions, in hours of lonely meditation, or by 
the side of an open grave. In the hurly-burly of life 
the sense of what Carlyle calls the Immensities, 
Eternities, and Silences, become so weak that even 
good men have sorrowfully to admit that they live 
lives of practical materialism. As Arnold puts it : 

" Each day brings its petty dust 
Our soon-choked souls to fill, 
And we forget because we must, 
And not because we will." 

The mission of the Hebrew prophet was by passionate 
utterance to keep alive in the minds of his countrymen 
a deep, abiding sense of life's mystery, sacredness, and 
solemnity. What Isaiah did for his day, Carlyle did 
for the moderns. In the whole range of modern 
literature, it is impossible to match Carlyle's mag- 
nificent passages in Sartor Resarttis, in which, under 
a biographical guise, he deals with the great primal 
emotions, wonder, awe, admiration, love, which form 
the warp and woof of human life. 

Nothing can be finer than the following rebuke to 
those mechanical scientists who imagine that Nature 
can be measured by tape-lines, and duly labelled in 
museums : — 

1 System of Nature ! To the wisest man, wide as is 
his vision, Nature remains of quite infinite depth, of 



iS4 FAMOUS SCOTS 

quite infinite expansion ; and all Experience thereof 
limits itself to some few computed centuries and 
measured square-miles. The course of Nature's phases, 
on this our little fraction of a Planet, is partially 
known to us ; but who knows what deeper courses 
these depend on ; what infinitely larger Cycle (of 
causes) our little Epicycle revolves on? To the 
Minnow every cranny and pebble, and quality and 
accident, of its little native Creek may have become 
familiar : but does the Minnow understand the Ocean 
Tides and periodic Currents, the Trade-winds, and 
Monsoons, and Moon's eclipses ; by all which the 
condition of its little Creek is regulated, and may, 
from time (^miraculously enough), be quite overset 
and reversed ? Such a minnow is Man ; his Creek 
this Planet Earth ; his Ocean the immeasurable All ; 
his Monsoons and periodic Currents the mysterious 
Course of Providence through iEons of JEons. We 
speak of the Volume of Nature : and truly a Volume 
it is, — whose Author and Writer is God.' 

Agree or disagree with Carlyle's views of the Ultimate 
Reality as we may, there can be nothing but harmony 
with the spirit which breathes in the following : — 

' Nature ? Ha ! Why do I not name thee God ? Art 
not thou the " Living Garment of God " ? O Heavens, 
is it in very deed, He, then, that ever speaks through 
thee ; that lives and loves in thee, that lives and loves 
in me? 



THOMAS CARLYLE 155 

' Fore-shadows, call them rather fore-splendours, of 
that Truth, and Beginning of Truths, fell mysteriously 
over my soul. Sweeter than Dayspring to the Ship- 
wrecked in Nova Zembla ; ah ! like the mother's voice 
to her little child that strays bewildered, weeping in 
unknown tumults ; like soft streamings of celestial 
music to my too-exasperated heart, came that Evangel. 
The Universe is not dead and demoniacal, a 
charnel-house with spectres ; but godlike, and my 
Father's ! ' 

The mystery and fleetingness of life with its awful 
counterpart death, are the commonplaces of every hour, 
but who but Carlyle has rendered them with such 
inspirational power ? 

1 Generation after generation takes to itself the form 
of a Body ; and forth-issuing from Cimmerian Night, 
on Heaven's mission appears. What Force and Fire 
is in each he expends : one grinding in the mill of 
Industry ; one hunter-like climbing the giddy Alpine 
heights of Science ; one madly dashed to pieces on the 
rocks of Strife, in war with his fellow : — and then 
the Heaven-sent is recalled; his earthly Vesture falls 
away, and soon even to sense becomes a vanished 
Shadow. Thus, like some wild-flaming, wild-thunder- 
ing train of Heaven's Artillery, does this mysterious 
Mankind thunder and flame, in long-drawn, quick- 
succeeding grandeur, through the unknown Deep. 
Thus, like a God-created, fire-breathing Spirit-host, we 



156 FAMOUS SCOTS 

emerge from the Inane ; haste stormfully across the 
astonished Earth ; then plunge ag°in into the Inane. 
Earth's mountains are levelled, and her seas filled up, 
in our passage ; can the Earth, which is but dead and 
a vision, resist Spirits which have reality and are alive ? 
On the hardest adamant some footprint of us is 
stamped in ; the last Rear of the host will read traces 
of the earliest Van. But whence ? — O Heaven, 
whither ? Sense knows not ; Faith knows not ; only 
that it is through Mystery to Mystery, from God and 
to God. 

' We are such stuff 
As Dreams are made of, and our little Life 
Is rounded with a sleep ? ' 

A fervid perception of the evanescence and sorrows 
of life is the root of Carlyle's pathos, which is unsur- 
passed in literature. It leads him to some beautiful 
contrasts between childhood and manhood, positively 
idyllic in their charm. 

1 Happy season of Childhood ! ' exclaims Teufels- 
drockh : c Kind Nature, that art to all a bountiful 
mother ; that visitest the poor man's hut with auroral 
radiance ; and for thy Nurseling hast provided a soft 
swathing of Love and infinite Hope, wherein he waxes 
and slumbers, danced-round (umgaukelt) by sweetest 
Dreams ! If the paternal Cottage still shuts us in, its 
roof still screens us ; with a Father we have as yet 
a prophet, priest and king, and an Obedience that 



THOMAS CARLYLE 157 

makes us Free. The young spirit has awakened out 
of Eternity, and knows not what we mean by Time ; 
as yet Time is no fast-hurrying stream, but a sportful 
sunlit ocean ; years to the child are as ages ; ah 1 the 
secret of Vicissitude, of that slower or quicker decay 
and ceaseless down-rushing of the universal World- 
fabric, from the granite mountain to the man or 
day-moth, is yet unknown ; and in a motionless 
Universe, we taste, what afterwards in this quick- 
whirling Universe is forever denied us, the balm of 
Rest. Sleep on, thou fair Child, for thy long rough 
journey is at hand ! A little while, and thou too shalt 
sleep no more, but thy very dreams shall be mimic 
battles ; thou too, with old Arnauld, must say in stern 
patience : " Rest ? Rest ? Shall I not have all 
Eternity to rest in ? " Celestial Nepenthe ! though a 
Pyrrhus conquer empires, and an Alexander sack the 
world, he finds thee not ; and thou hast once fallen 
gently, of thy own accord, on the eyelids, on the heart 
of every mother's child. For, as yet, sleep and waking 
are one : the fair Life-garden rustles infinite around, 
and everywhere is dewy fragrance, and the budding of 
Hope; which budding, if in youth, too frostnipt, it 
grow to flowers, will in manhood yield no fruit, but a 
prickly, bitter-rinded stone fruit, of which the fewest 
can find the kernel.' 

Carlyle's pathos touches its most sombre mood when 
he is dwelling upon the common incidents of daily 



158 FAMOUS SCOTS 

life as painted on the background of Eternity. In his 
1 Cromwell] he breaks forth in a beautiful meditation 
while dealing with a commonplace reference in one of 
the letters of Cromwell : — ' Mrs St John came down to 
breakfast every morning in that summer visit of the 
year 1638, and Sir William said grave grace, and they 
spake polite devout things to one another, and they 
are vanished, they and their things and speeches, — all 
silent like the echoes of the old nightingales that sang 
that season, like the blossoms of the old roses. O 
Death ! O Time ! ' 

Severe comment has been made upon Carlyle's 
attitude towards science. There was this excuse for 
his contemptuous attitude — science in its early days 
fell into the hands of Dryasdusts. So absorbed were 
these men in analysing Nature, that they missed the 
sense of mystery and beauty which is the essence of 
all poetry and all religion. In the hands of the Dryas- 
dusts, Nature was converted into a museum in which 
everything was duly labelled. During the mania for 
analysis, it was forgotten that there is a great difference 
between the description and the explanation of pheno- 
mena. In Sartor Resartus Carlyle rescues science 
from the grip of the pedant and restores it to the 
poet. ' Wonder, is the basis of Worship ; the reign of 
wonder is perennial, indestructible in Man ; only at 
certain stages (as the present), it is, for some short 
season, a reign in partibus infidelhon. t That progress 



THOMAS CARLYLE i 59 

of Science, which is to destroy Wonder, and in its 
stead substitute Mensuration and Numeration, finds 
small favour with Teufelsdrockh, much as he otherwise 
venerates these two latter processes. 

'Shall your Science,' exclaims he, 'proceed in the 
small chink-lighted, or even oil-lighted, underground 
workshop of Logic alone ; and man's mind become an 
Arithmetical Mill, whereof Memory is the Hopper, 
and mere Tables of Sines and Tangents, Codification, 
and Treatises of what you call Political Economy, are 
the Meal? And what is that Science, which the 
scientific head alone, were it screwed off, and (like the 
Doctor's in the Arabian Tale) set in a basin to keep it 
alive, could prosecute without shadow of a heart,— but 
one other of the mechanical and menial handicrafts, 
for which the Scientific Head (having a Soul in it) 
is too noble an organ ? I mean that Thought without 
Reverence is barren, perhaps poisonous ; at best, dies 
like Cookery with the day that called it forth ; does not 
live, like sowing, in successive tilths and wider-spread- 
ing harvests, bringing food and plenteous increase to 
all Time.' 

1 The man who cannot wonder, who does not habitu- 
ally wonder (and worship), were he President of in- 
numerable Royal Societies, and carried the whole 
Mecanique Celeste and Hegel's Philosophy, and the 
epitome of all Laboratories and Observatories with 



160 FAMOUS SCOTS 

their results, in his single head, — is but a pair of 
Spectacles behind which there is no Eye. Let those 
who have Eyes look through him, then he may be 
useful.' 

In the sphere of ethics, Carlyle's influence has been 
inspirational in the highest sense. To a generation 
which had to choose between the ethics of a conven- 
tional theology and the ethics of a cold, prosaic utilita- 
rianism, Carlyle's treatment of the whole subject of duty 
came as a revelation. If in the sphere of social rela- 
tionships he did not contribute to the settlement of the 
theoretic side of complex problems, he did what was 
equally important — he roused earnest minds to a 
sense of the urgency and magnitude of the problem, 
awakened the feeling of individual responsibility, and 
quickened the sense of social duty which had grown 
weak during the reign of laissez faire. If Carlyle had 
no final message for mankind, if he brought no gospel 
of glad tidings, he nevertheless did a work which was 
as important as it was pressing. In the form of a 
modern John the Baptist, the Chelsea Prophet with 
not a little of the wilderness atmosphere about him, 
preached in grimly defiant mood to a pleasure-loving 
generation the great doctrines which lie at the 
root of all religions — the doctrines of Repentance, 
Righteousness, and Retribution. 



